Research Guides: Data Services : Black Lives Matter Data and Resources Collection

Black Lives Matters Data and Resources

During the summer of 2020, NYU Data Services embarked on a project to foreground the Black Lives Matter movement in our teaching, consultation, and instructional resources. Our project is motivated by a desire to teach critically and connect others with tools, data, and skills that will enable learners at NYU to explicitly confront racism.

The resources on this guide are a reflection of our ongoing work to develop anti-racist pedagogies. This page is a highly selective overview of NYU Libraries resources and Data Services teaching materials that advocate for anti-racism. Our work has a few goals:

Develop data into formats that are easily used in software by others
Create original research and data that reflects the movements of 2020
Contextualize data with materials and lesson plans for teaching
Augment our existing approaches to teaching to include anti-racist themes

For more information see the NYU Libraries Commitment to Anti-Racism

NYU Curated Datasets and Resources

Original Data Creations

Photos of Artwork of the Black Lives Matter Movement in Soho, New York City (Shapefile and Images)
This collection of 86 photos represents locations of street art, graffiti, murals, and other scenes of the Black Lives Matter movement that took place in Soho, New York City in early-June, 2020. The images were captured in the days following the murder of George Floyd, who was killed while in police custody in Minneapolis, MN on May 25, 2020. Many images depict shuttered storefronts that have been covered with graffiti, murals, and artwork. These expressions constitute celebration of Black life and outrage for the violence and brutality Black people have experienced at the hands of the police. Please be advised that this collection contains images with profane words and epithets that are borne of race-based violence and hatred. The photos were taken by Bonnie Lawrence. See also the #BLM in SoHo ESRI StoryMap and Shapefile with photos in Spatial Data Repository.
Residential Inequality (ESRI StoryMap)
This StoryMap was created by Data Services to visualize residential inequity in New York City and more broadly, in the United States. It is intended to show how census data along with other historical data sets can be used to show how inherently discriminatory housing policy can and continues to contribute to systemic racism in the United States today. Specifically, this StoryMap uses residentially focused data sets in order to narrow the scope of the project and allow for in depth analysis, in which multiple kinds of data are connected with a narrative framework. Any NYU student, faculty and staff can request access to ESRI StoryMaps.
Sentiment Analysis of Black Lives Matter Tweets (R Markdown notebook)
This R Markdown workbook document is a structured approach to quantitatively analyze the reaction to George Floyd’s death and address its political consequences using Twitter data. Anyone can use this workbook to see how we use Twitter data to do sentiment analysis in R statistical programming language. The focus is on text data wrangling, visualization, and interpretation with basic topic modeling at the end.
Racial Covenants in Hennepin County (U of Minnesota Mapping Prejudice Project)
This data was compiled by the Mapping Prejudice Project and shows the location of racial covenants recorded in Hennepin County between 1910 and 1955. Racial covenants were legal clauses embedded in property records that restricted ownership and occupancy of land parcels based on race. These covenants dramatically reshaped the demographic landscape of Hennepin County in the first half of the twentieth century. (Original dataset published in 2020: https://doi.org/10.13020/a88t-yb14)

GIS and Geospatial Data

Washington Post Locations of Unsolved Homicides in the US, 2008-2018
This point shapefile represents locations of more than 52,000 criminal homicides between the years 2008-2018 (approximately) in 50 of the largest American cities. The data includes the location of the killing, whether an arrest was made and, in most cases, basic demographic information about each victim.
Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America
Between 1935 and 1940, the federal government's Home Owners' Loan Corporation created redlining maps for almost every major American city. Mapping Inequality lets you explore and download these maps and learn about the history of racial and ethnic discrimination in housing policy. These files are in GeoJSON format and are made available by the University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab.

NYU Instructional Materials

Visualizing Race Identity among Second-Generation Immigrants in New York, 1999-2001
This lesson plan integrates a dataset and sample data visualizations of a study that explore race identity among immigrants in the metro NYC area during the late 1990s and early 2000s. It comes with a pre-cleaned dataset and some example questions and exercises to encourage students to think about how social research engages questions of race identity.

Data Services

General Information

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Black Lives Matters Data and Resources

NYU Curated Datasets and Resources

Original Data Creations

GIS and Geospatial Data

NYU Instructional Materials