Data resources
Published on LinkedIn as an article on 2025-11-06, and announced in a post on 2025-11-06. The text below is the article as published.
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Links to works now on this site point to their pages here; the words are as published.
In mid-2022, I shared my manifesto for a progressive culture for data in public health. When I retired from CDC about 6 months ago, I said (more or less) that I’d work on writing and share that writing. Here are 4 resources that I’ve developed for learners or about learners. I will unpack these resources over the coming weeks.
Data in the MMWR: In this long-form review, I share with learners how I recommend reviewing the uses of data in public health publications, by focusing on 56 full reports from the MMWR.
CDC text corpora for learners: In this code repository, I package and share the full text of 3 CDC serials, along with my Python code for the full harvesting exercise: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 1982-2024, Emerging Infectious Diseases 1995-2024, and Preventing Chronic Disease 2004-2024. These corpora can be used, for example, to hone one’s skills with HTML, regular expressions, and analyzing text.
Collate MMWR HTML: This code repository extracts from the text corpora and collates the 56 reports included in the long-form review.
A culture for doing good things with data: In this long-form essay, I expand on my manifesto and its animating credo: Everyone who wants to do good things with data (in public health and elsewhere) should have the intellectual support to do so; in turn, they must proceed with rigor and stand behind their work.
These resources are freely available under CC0-1.0 license for GitHub and CC BY-SA 4.0 for essays.
Data in the MMWR
- Introduction · How learners read
- 1 · Sources
- 2 · Methods
- 3 · Description
- 4 · Comparison
- 5 · Adjustment
- 6 · Conclusions
- 7 · Tables
- 8 · Figures
- 9 · Interpretation
- 10 · Impact
- 11 · Context
- 12 · Additional practices