mittenchops/deaths-by-country

State department data cleaning fest, from http://travel.state.gov/law/family_issues/death/death_600.html

US State Department Data of Deaths by US Citizens Abroad

Data is from here

The data is a little messy in the geographics. I did some Levenshtein matches to sync it with ISO codes, but there are a fair number of data irregularities that made things hard--- where Levs didn't match, I ran the address through googlemaps API, which did a pretty good job of identifying the country.

Over the next couple of days, with my 1000 API calls per day, I'm going to go back to the original list and record lat-longs, so the actual accident sites, by city, will be available for mapping.

The most useful item in this repo is probably output/useful.csv.

The source file is source/report.xls

There are several correspondences in the source folder from various ISO crosswalks---licenses looked open source. Please let me know if I got that incorrect from anyone. (The ISO itself will ask you to buy a copy of the standard, so definitely do that if you're considering commercial use of of any of this.)

The code itself is pretty ugly---due in part to the API limitations of google maps meaning Levenshteins were cheaper to run than API calls, but also due to data cleaning having a lot of side effects, making imperative loops more necessary and clean functions trickier. A lot of this cleaning might have been easier in R.

Anyway, the output/useful.csv file gives you:

• /common/ country name (more often than the semi-useless formal one)
• ISO-3166-alpha-2
• ISO-3166-alpha-3
• Cause of Death
• Aggregated Cause of Death (so, all "Drowning" are together)
• Detail (For "Drowning - Canal", "Drowning - Ocean", the second part, only "Canal", "Ocean")

Travel safe.