Data
View Seshat Data
About Seshat Data
The Seshat team makes our data publicly available in three different ways.
First, we deposit in open access all data on which analyses are based at the time of publication of the article that reports these analyses. These "replication datasets" are published as downloadable spreadsheets. In many cases we post preprints of articles on SocArXiv accompanied by the data and analysis scripts.
Second, we periodically publish "snapshots" of the Seshat Databank for well-curated variables and polities. The current such data release is Polaris-2026, which presents data in an excel spreadsheet. Different collections of variables (general, social complexity, military technology, etc.) are stored as different sheets on the spreadsheet.
Polaris-2026 is forward looking and brings together all data upon which the next series of forthcoming publications is based. This approach allows our collaborators and other domain experts to browse our data and suggest improvements.
Third, our data is accessible through an API, where the newest version of the dataset can be found and downloaded. There are two Github packages which interact with the API: seshat_api and SeshatDatasetAnalysis. Both in python, the former allows users to download entire variable datasets from the API while the latter creates temporal sequences aimed at reproducing earlier research results from the team.
Replication Datasets
A list of current Replication Datasets can be found here.
Polaris-2026 Dataset
The newest snapshot, Polaris, can be found in a GitHub repository alongside scripts to generate the data and compare it to the previous release (Equinox).
Equinox-2020 Dataset
Equinox data is still available to as a spreadsheet. The full Codebook containing all our variables (including those on which the work continues, which are not yet ready for release) can be found in the Methods section of the website.
