Venezuela suffers from a deep and entrenched divide between its urban and its rural populations. The rolling blackouts and power cuts that have struck the country over the past decade, however, have disproportionately affected the rural population, keeping millions in the dark.

When he’s not in the classroom, Emerson professor Barry Marshall doubles as the president of the college’s part-time faculty union. And he doesn’t treat it as a hobby — as the son of a longshoreman, he says he knows firsthand how important collective action can be.

This dataset documents all “non-white players” in Major League Baseball (MLB) between 1903 (the year that “major league” baseball is considered to have begun) and 1946 (the year before “integration” of the major leagues).

In the 21st century, we’ve seen the sorts of stories that can be extracted from massive, otherwise-incomprehensible data sets. The niche for data journalism is growing in the areas of economics and public affairs reporting.