Wikipedia

As we all know, Wikipedia contains a wealth of information about pretty much anything you could hope for. Certain facts and figures are organized in a pretty standard way across Wikipedia entries, making them easily extractable with a little bit of coding.

UK Data Archive

[http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/find ]

“The UK’s largest collected of digital research data in the social sciences and humanities.” This is an educational and research oriented catalog of over 5,000 data sets. Seems like there could be a lot of useful stuff to find here.

Google Public Data Explorer

[http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory]

The main purpose of this looks to be displaying the data in interactive graphs, but they also provide the sources of the data. Playing with Google’s graphs could be good for previewing the data and seeing whether there are any interesting trends to explore, and then the actual data could be used for our purposes.