TidyTuesday

Unlike traffic cameras that catch speeding, parking tickets are issued by people patrolling neighborhoods. This dataset shows every ticket written in Philadelphia in 2017, including what the violation was, how much you'd have to pay, where it happened, and who issued it. You can map out which neighborhoods get ticketed most, whether certain agencies are stricter than others, or how fines vary by violation type.

Spotify analyzed 30,000+ songs and gave each one scores for things like how danceable it is, how energetic, how acoustic, and how much it sounds like someone talking. The scores range from 0 to 1 for most metrics, so you can directly compare whether hip-hop is really more energetic than classical, or if pop songs are actually bouncier. The data also includes basic info like artist name, album, release date, tempo, and which playlist genre each song belongs to. If you've ever wondered why certain songs feel different or wanted to explore what makes a genre sound the way it does, this is the raw material.

Home prices in your state compared to everyone else's, month by month since 1975. The index shows whether homes are getting more or less expensive relative to a baseline year. If your state's index is 250, homes are roughly 2.5 times more expensive than they were at the baseline. You can track how your state's housing market performed during major events like the 2008 financial crisis or the pandemic boom.

Beyoncé has released hundreds of songs, and this dataset gives you every lyric, broken into individual lines. You can search for specific words, count which phrases appear most often, analyze the tone or mood of different albums, or study how her writing has changed over time. It's the kind of data linguists and music researchers use when they want to look for patterns in what an artist writes about.

Twenty thousand real games played by people on Lichess, a free chess website. For each game, you get who played (their usernames and skill ratings), what opening they used (catalogued with standard chess codes), every move that was played, how long the game took, and who won. If you're curious about which openings are popular, how ratings affect outcomes, or want to analyze chess strategy patterns, this is the raw material.

Activists around the world went out and collected plastic trash, then sorted it by type and tracked which companies' brands were most common in the waste. This dataset has their findings. You can see which countries had the most plastic pollution, which companies' products showed up most often in the trash, and what types of plastic (like the stuff used for soda bottles or food containers) were most common. It's crowd-sourced environmental monitoring that turns local cleanup efforts into global data.