POL1 300: Public Policymaking in American Politics

GDELT is the largest, most comprehensive, and highest resolution open database of human society ever created. Creating a platform that monitors the world's news media from nearly every corner of every country in print, broadcast, and web formats, in over 100 languages, every moment of every day and that stretches back to January 1, 1979 through present day, with daily updates, required an unprecedented array of technical and methodological innovations, partnerships, and whole new mindsets to bring this all together and make it a reality. Creating a database of a quarter billion georeferenced records covering the entire world over 30 years, coupled with the massive networks that connect all of the people, organizations, locations, themes, and emotions underlying those events, required not only solving unparalleled challenges to create the database, but also a "reimagining" of how we interact and think about societal-scale data.

Google Trends allows you to see the topics people are—or aren’t—following, practically in real time. Journalists can use this information to explore potential story ideas, and can also feature Trends data within news stories to illustrate a general level of interest in, say, a political candidate, social issue or event.

Data sets with advice on what each set is useful for - quality of life, homelessness, disabilities, etc.

KFF is a source for health policy research, polling, and journalism. This link leads to a dashboard on abortion data and research.

This is a non-exclusive database of some recommended sources for research projects. It is continuously updated.