dataset – paulvanderlaken.com

Vincent Warmerdam shared this Youtube video which I thoroughly enjoyed watched. It’s about Saul Pwanson, a software engineer whose hobby project got a little out of hand.

In 2016, Saul Pwanson designed a plain-text file format for crossword puzzle data, and then spent a couple of months building a micro-data-pipeline, scraping tens of thousands of crosswords from various sources.

After putting all these crosswords in a simple uniform format, Saul used some simple command line commands to check for common patterns and irregularities.

Surprisingly enough, after visualizing the results, Saul discovered egregious plagiarism by a major crossword editor that had gone on for years.

Ultimately, 538 even covered the scandal:

I thoroughly enjoyed watching this talk on Youtube.

Saul covers the file format, data pipeline, and the design choices that aided rapid exploration; the evidence for the scandal, from the initial anomalies to the final damning visualization; and what it’s like for a data project to get 15 minutes of fame.

I tried to localize the dataset online, but it seems Saul’s website has since gone offline. If you do happen to find it, please do share it in the comments!

I used to keep a repository of links to interesting datasets to learn data science. However, that page I can retire, as Google has launched its new service Dataset Search.

The “world wide web” hosts millions of datasets, on nearly any topic you can think of. Google’s Dataset Search has indexed almost 25 million of these datasets, giving you a single entry point to search for datasets online. After a year of testing, Dataset Search is now officially out of beta.

After alpha testing, Dataset Search now includes filter based on the types of dataset that you want (e.g., tables, images, text), on whether the dataset is open source/access. For dataset on geographic area’s, you can see the map. The quality of dataset’s descriptions has improved greatly, and the tool now has a mobile version.

Anyone who publishes data can make their datasets discoverable in Dataset Search by describe the properties of their dataset using a special schema on their own web page.