About
Plain English Data is a public data translation service. We take openly available data — the kind that gets published in massive spreadsheets nobody reads — and turn it into something you can actually understand.
It often feels like data is made difficult to access and interpret on purpose. It shouldn't be. If the data exists and it affects your life, you should be able to see it without wading through jargon, downloading a CSV, or sitting through a 3,000-word report stuffed with numbers that lose meaning as the word count increases.
Who's behind this
I'm Sam and I've worked in data for over a decade. When it comes to explaining data, I try to keep things simple, to the point, and honest.
Obviously everyone has their biases, conscious and unconscious. I'll do my best to present data as impartially as possible and build the tools to let you draw your own conclusions.
Plain English Data is a project of Mariposa Bay Studios, a small independent studio based in the UK.
Get in touch
If you've spotted something that doesn't look right, have a suggestion for a dataset we should cover, or just want to say hello:
For questions about the underlying data itself, see our sources page which links to the original publishers.