Where to Collect Original Data for Personal Projects
Creating personal projects can be an excellent way to standout to employers by applying skills to tangible projects that show your technical knowledge.
However, many of the most popular datasets like the Titanic dataset or the Iris flower dataset are frankly…boring.
Using the same dataset over and over again doesn’t reveal anything about your own curiosities or interests.
I list some ideas below to help you create unique data projects with your own data that you can collect for free.
Download Data From Your Own Social Media Accounts.
If you are an active social media user, you are already generating tons of data. One of the most practical ways of finding original data is look at our own social media accounts. In the example below, I used to Twitter Analytics to pull information for a personal project. There is an option to download the performance of your tweets across time as a csv file.
LinkedIn also has an option to download your information. It’s not as detailed as Twitter analytics, but it’s still worth downloading your account data ever once in a while.
If you have a Facebook business account page you can also view your engagement and views, which could be another source of data for personal projects.
Web Scraping
Web scraping is a more technical approach to data collection, but it is the most fruitful. The internet is massive and web scraping can be a fast way to collect data and also improve skills in areas like Python or other tools that you find most useful in web scraping.
Web scraping is limited to your own creativity, interests, and rules of the webpage host.
For example, below is a list of the largest companies by revenue found on Wikpedia.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_the_United_States_by_revenue
Within a few minutes, I was able to collect data that can be used for a personal projects. Wikipedia is fairly easy to scrape, so give other websites a shot in order to find data that interests you.
Get Creative: Record Your Own Observations
Lastly, if you don’t have a social media account or you don’t want to scrape data from web pages, you can record your own observations.
For example, a Redditor recorded their own heartbeats during their dissertation defense and showed the most stressful moments visually. They posted the results in a popular subreddit called Data is Beautiful.
If you still running out of ideas, browsing through Data is Beautiful can give you inspiration, or just simply Google “personal project ideas.”
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