Our downloads are now served with CORS

All data downloads offered by the California Civic Data Coalition are now served with cross-origin resource sharing allowed, opening our site for creative use in dynamic web applications.

Also known as “CORS,” cross-origin resource sharing is an Internet publishing standard that allows code running on other sites to freely request and integrate data.

This change was made to allow an experimental integration with Observable, the promising new interactive notebook for developing data-driven applications in the cloud.

Now that we’re publishing with CORS, JavaScript code written at Observable, or any other site, can pull data directly from URLs on our downloads page.

You can see an example in action in an analysis of third-party candidates we developed with Observable at the Coalition’s campus invasion of Stanford University earlier this month.

There I worked with Cheryl Phillips’ journalism students to document the stark drop off in third-party candidates since California adopted an open primary system.

If you’re interested in learning more about Observable, I encourage you to check out other examples, such as Jeremy Ashkenas’ earthquakes map and a fascinating experiment with sound by Stanford student Dylan Freedman. Then try to write your own!