Journalism & Media

The Accountability Project gives researchers and journalists a powerful, but simple tool to search across data that would otherwise be siloed. Our collection includes more than 1.9 billion public records.

Under the OPEN Government Data Act, which is Title II of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, government data is required to be made available in open, machine-readable formats, while continuing to ensure privacy and security. You'll find data on local governments, the environment, older adults, energy and so on. These data are from local and federal agencies.

Data is Plural is a website that contains open datasets from all different disciplines. It is not well organized, but you can search by using the community-built tools (on the 3rd tab of the spreadsheet) to find datasets of interest.

Using a simple keyword search, users can discover datasets hosted in thousands of repositories across the Web as well as some subscription-based databases. It has many duplicates, less refined search filters, and lacks studies citing the data.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) guarantees everyone the right to access data and records from the federal government. FOIA.gov includes background on the law and instructions on how to make a FOIA request with various federal agencies, as well as reports and data on current and past FOIA requests individual agencies have received. This link is to a Research Guide with more information including how to find Texas Information, Austin information and UT information.

This nonprofit offers guidance and assistance to journalists and members of the public on accessing public information from local and state agencies through the Texas Public Information Act. The organization offers an overview of the Texas Public Information Act and Texas Open Meetings Act, an annual conference with updates on legislative changes and legal cases related to public information access in the state, public information request letter templates, and a FOI hotline to answer questions on specific public information requests.

Google aggregates datasets and data metrics from more than 100 sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau, Eurostat, Ireland’s Central Statistics Office, UK’s Data.gov, the World Economic Forum, OECD Factbook, and the Inter-American Development Bank, among others.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice offers statistics on executions, demographic information, and criminal charges for currently imprisoned offenders. The site also lists data on the number of death row inmates and death row convictions by county.

The National Neighborhood Data Archive (NaNDA) is a publicly available data archive containing contextual measures for locations across the United States. Each NaNDA dataset covers all or most of the entire nation (including both rural and urban areas) and represents a set of measures on a single topic of interest, including socioeconomic disadvantage, healthcare, housing, partisanship, and public transit, with coverage dating back to 1981.