Today is a time of rapid change, with so many federal programs shrinking or going offline altogether. In response, new efforts are underway to rescue data, including diversity, equity, and inclusion data. This month, I look at leading efforts to preserve data and resources for the public.
The Data Rescue Project is a grass roots citizen science effort to preserve at-risk federal data. It is a leading effort to preserve data across a wide range of subjects, including justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. It’s free to subscribe to gain access to data the collaborative has preserved. Once you have created an account, check out the Resources page, which has links to data sources, tools, and other valuable resources. Especially important is the Data Rescue Tracker, which catalogs data preserved by the collaborative. The Tracker page also has a facility for submitting data for preservation.
The Climate Mirror Project is another citizen science data rescue collaboration, this time focused on climate data from many agencies. Combined with demographics data from the American Community Survey, it’s an invaluable resource for research on the disparate impact of climate change that falls most heavily on marginalized groups.
In many cases, rescued data and documents have landed on digital public libraries such as the Internet Archive. The archive describes itself as “a non-profit library of millions of free texts, movies, software, music, websites, and more.” In the past few months, the Internet Archive has become a hive of activity for preserving federal data at risk. With the current effort to scrub DEI information, data, documents, and tools from federal websites, the archive has become a valuable tool. Another important feature of the Internet Archive is their Wayback Machine, which preserves government websites and their content from earlier points in time.
Signing up for an Internet Archive account allows you to access and upload resources. For example, a longitudinal US Justice Department study on crime rates by immigration status shows immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans, with unregistered immigrants committing the fewest of all. The study, which was last updated in September, was scrubbed from the Justice Department website early this year. I was able to use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to find the most recent copy of the study and preserve it. The archive even has a Diversity Advisory Group. Examples of DEI data available on the Internet Archive include research, books, standards, videos, and more.
Data rescue efforts have roots going back to early 2017, as statisticians, data scientists, and other data experts in academia, government, and industry have worked to find and archive data at risk. I, myself, have been archiving American Community Survey demographic data at the ZIP code level since 2016. In these grass roots efforts, subject matter experts are needed in every area to preserve data and keep it available to the public.
An example of someone preserving data is Lucky Tran, a molecular biology professor at Columbia whose team downloaded every publicly available file from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in late January-an action that could save countless lives as it preserves the data making life-saving science possible.
Another example is early-childhood education researcher Deanna Schreiber-Gregory, who is preserving data from the Department of Education.
All of us can use our subject-matter expertise to identify and preserve the most valuable data that is most at risk. Data rescue helps preserve and strengthen the science of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion, and we can all be involved.
The Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) Outreach Group Corner is a regular component of Amstat News in which statisticians write about and educate our community about JEDI-related matters. If you have an idea or article for the column, email the JEDI Corner manager at jedicorner@datascijedi.org.
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