Inspiration and goals.
Large datasets on international relations are relatively rare, especially in writing for general audiences, rather than academic papers. Therefore, we thought it would be interesting to create an accessible way to engage with some of the existing quantitative IR data.
In particular, one group member has an academic background and research interests in international relations and security, and used some of the Correlates of War data in their senior thesis. This led to an interest in creating an intuitive way to visually explore the data, rather than browsing through an enormous spreadsheet, or looking for particular relationships or effects with a statistics package.
Through this project, we hope to provide a straightforward, engaging means for people to interact with information on international relations. Specifically, our project will allow users to explore how relationships between different countries have changed over time - which countries have been allied, when, and for how long? Ideally, this will give users with an entry point into the world of quantitative data on international relations (a relatively new trend), and allow for intuitive exploration of data that might otherwise seem overwhelming, given its global scale and large time range.