The dashboard relies on data from a project of the University of Illinois’ Cline Center for Advanced Social Research (https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/), called Social, Political, and Economic Event Database (SPEED) Project. More exactly, it visualizes the dataset posted to their website on February 15, 2018, under the name “spp_public.xls”. It is an event data sheet containing 62,141 newsworthy conflictual episodes from all over the world. The events are classified into four large groups as “political expression”, “political attack”, “disruptive state actions”, and “political reconfigurations”. For analytic work, two different tables were created. One preserved the SPEED data intact, just added some calculated columns and country-level data to it. The second was created by calculating yearly averages of conflict occurrence and conflict intensity for each country. Related work was included in a paper presented on July 17, 2023, at the conference of the International Political Science Association in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and later developed into a publication: “Conflicts Rooted in Socio-Cultural Animosities: A Historical Analysis”, with Kenneth Keulman, Cogent Social Sciences, Vol. 10, 2024 – Issue 1, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311886.2024.2435587 – OPEN ACCESS
How to use the dashboard:
The Power BI report consists of seven visible pages, which can be navigated through the little arrows under the dashboard visuals. Nine hidden pages can be reached from the “Details of Origin Types” hub (tab #5). Except for this hub-page, all others contain graphic visuals and slicers (filters). The slicers allow for multiple selections with Ctrl +click, and may be reset by clicking on the little eraser in their right top corner. In all visuals, additional information can be seen by hovering the cursor over datapoints or graphic elements. The whole dashboard can be magnified to full page-size by clicking the diagonal arrow in the bottom right corner.
[1] SPEED Global Random Sample 1945-2005