data-lectures

The canonical repository for data consumed by the QuantEcon lecture series, referenced by stable URLs.

Status: renamed from QuantEcon/data (2026-07-16) and being shaped into the canonical lecture-data repo per QuantEcon/meta#336. See PLAN.md for the roadmap and AGENTS.md for working conventions. The full data-hosting convention is drafted in QuantEcon.manual#108.

The routing rule

• Data consumed by lectures → this repo, referenced by a stable URL
• Data owned by a specific book, project, or package → that project's own repo
• Never commit a new dataset into a lecture repository

Referencing data

Until the data.quantecon.org Pages deployment is live, use the interim form. There is no single safe form — it depends on the consumer's runtime (repoint rule 5):

Consumer	Use
CPython — site notebooks, Colab, every series except lecture-wasm	https://github.com/QuantEcon/data-lectures/raw/main/lectures/<file>
Browser — lecture-wasm code cells, which execute under Pyodide in the reader's browser	https://raw.githubusercontent.com/QuantEcon/data-lectures/main/lectures/<file>

The github.com/…/raw/ form is a 302 whose response carries an empty access-control-allow-origin, so a browser rejects it before following the redirect. The strict audit fails on any lecture-wasm code-cell read that uses it. {download} targets and prose links are plain navigations, so any resolving form is fine there.

Once publishing lands (PLAN Phase 4), the canonical form becomes:

https://data.quantecon.org/lectures/<filename>

Never use media.githubusercontent.com. It is the LFS media endpoint and routes per path, so it 404s every file this repo publishes — lectures/ is 100% plain git, and LFS is confined to sources/, which is never served (#58). Never pin a branch other than main.

Adding a dataset

1. Confirm the license permits redistribution.
2. Classify it: verbatim (third-party file as distributed), constructed (built by our processing — commit the builder too), or dynamic snapshot (tracks a moving source — builder plus refresh cadence).
3. Open a PR with the file, its manifest, and any builder.
4. Reference it from the lecture by the canonical URL — the lecture PR builds green immediately, no two-step merge.
5. Add the lecture to the dataset's consumers list.

See the draft convention for the full checklist and manifest schema.

Layout

Path	What	Published
lectures/	the published tree — flat. Every dataset lives here, directly. No folder implies ownership by a lecture series: any lecture may consume any file	yes
scripts/	builders for constructed and dynamic datasets, plus the audit-dashboard generator	no
manifest-schema.yml	the per-dataset manifest schema (strawman — see PLAN.md Phase 2)	no
migration.yml	the migration lifecycle tracker — which PRs landed and repointed each dataset (transitional; archivable when the migration programme completes)	rendered

The tree is flat because the URL is the interface: lectures/<filename> maps to data.quantecon.org/lectures/<filename>, so a file can never be re-filed under a new owner and break its consumers. Anything outside lectures/ is not served.

The audit dashboard

A generated dashboard covering all data referenced by the 8 synced Python-family lecture repos — the full-universe audit plus a per-dataset migration tracker — deploys to this repo's GitHub Pages site alongside the published lectures/ tree (data-lectures#20).

python scripts/build_audit.py all --strict     # scan + render into site/

The scan greps each lecture repo's main (clones under --repos-dir; defaults to this repo's parent, matching the workspace-lectures layout), classifies every data reference, and reconciles three sources of truth: the manifests (lectures/*.yml, migrated datasets), migration.yml (lifecycle + PR provenance), and scripts/audit_annotations.yml (curated judgment for not-yet-migrated references). A new data reference with no annotation, or a migration status the scan contradicts, fails the build — the dashboard cannot silently rot. CI rebuilds it on push to main, weekly, and on demand (.github/workflows/audit-dashboard.yml).