Document Actions
The Data Consortium
What's New:
- Data Drip -- A new blog about access to data and data policy
- Six Steps Toward a Stronger, More Transparent, More Accountable FCC in the Obama Era
Understanding the public sphere--and developing good public policy to support it--requires access to data about media and the public sphere: data on industry structure, audiences, programming, internet traffic, and other basic measures of our increasingly convergent media environment. In the U.S., much of this data is privately collected, and priced for large corporations. Independent researchers, public interest groups, and policymakers operate at a major disadvantage in this environment.
For many reasons, unequal access to data is a recipe for poor public policy. Notably, it makes the examination of policy proposals and evaluation of policy outcomes difficult at best. As this situation becomes the norm, media policymaking moves away from basic principles of public accountability.
The consortium is a vehicle for expressing the data-related concerns and collective bargaining power of scholarly and public-interest communities in this area.
This community-editable database addresses the lack of systematic information about media and communications datasets, including their research uses and terms of access. We welcome your help in developing descriptions of and commentary on datasets. You may also choose to make your own data more widely available by creating a new dataset profile and uploading a record (20MB max).