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Polynesia & Hawai'ian Islands Research Guide: Data & Statistics

This guide provides an overview of resources for beginning research on the countries and ethnic cultures in the geographic region comprising the Polynesian Island region with focus on Hawai'i and New Zealand.

Polynesia Data & Statistics

Data offers collections of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted formally, and presented in text-based and peer-reviewed research. See below for both general and Polynesia-specific data and statistics resources available through the WPI Library and on the web.

Data Research Resources

The following peer-reviewed Data Science journals are available through Browzine via the Gordon Library homepage. Browzine is the library's convenient academic journal searching tool, which gives access to users to a wide variety of subject relevant and specialized scholarly publications. Keyword search 'Data Science' for the results shown below. Sample journals are also highlighted below the image.

eBooks

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.

 

  • National Endowment for the Arts: Publicly Available Data Sources
    • A list of publicly accessible data sources that include arts-related variables (some restrictions may apply).  Publications are freely accessible to the public.  Donations are also accepted.
       
  • ICPSR
    • ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 250,000 files (many are publicly accessible) of research in the social and behavioral sciences. It hosts 21 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.
    • Some ICPSR data are freely available for anyone to download from the website. These data are part of the topical archives at ICPSR and generally include data pertaining to criminal justice, health and aging, substance abuse and mental health, child care, and health and medical care. Other data, referred to as members-only data, can only be downloaded by member institutions.
    • Lots of data are federally funded and do not require fees to access via an institution, but some studies have fees, which will be displayed within an application.
  • United Nations Department of Economics and Social Affairs

 

  • data.census.gov
    The census bureau has great nationally-representative data. Often used for public policy or economic research, it also offers data about families, income and poverty, and health that may be of use in research.  Data.census.gov has data from one centralized location so that users can spend less time searching for data and more time using data.
     
  • Google Dataset Search
    Dataset Search enables users to find datasets stored across the Web through a simple keyword search. The tool surfaces information about datasets hosted in thousands of repositories across the Web, making these datasets universally accessible and useful.

The following external web resources will help introduce students to some of the current applications of Data Sciences:

WPI's Data Science department has a list of resources that science students will have access to depending on their individual course plan here. 

You can also (whether or not you are working in a Data Science program or course) find lists of WPI-supported Data Analysis & Visualization software programs on the Academic & Research Computing (ARC) website here. 

ARC offers training on these programs throughout the year; contact the office at archelp@wpi.edu for more information.