The World Politics Data Lab was founded in the Summer of 2022 with the financial support of Drew University’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute. The Lab’s main mission is to foster collaborations among students, faculty, and staff who want to analyze world politics using various data science and data visualization methods.

The World Politics Data Lab’s first projects are linked to the Semester on the United Nations, which Professor Yordán has taught and directed since 2009. Each project includes short analyzes that explain different puzzles using different data analysis methods and techniques. These posts also include data visualizations to help readers understand key trends and patterns in the analyzed data. As new faculty join this initiative, more projects will be added to the existing list.

Students enrolled in the Semester on the United Nations will be encouraged to write posts about their research. Similarly, other students, as well as interested faculty and staff, will also be invited to contribute to existing projects or develop new ones.

The Lab’s Resource page includes posts to help students sharpen their research skills. The goal of these posts is to encourage students to think of ways to make their research workflow easier to replicate and reproduce. The first post introduces readers to coding in R and graphing using ggplot2. Other posts will explain how to read codebooks, how to structure data into tidy formats, and how to access the World Bank’s World Development Indicators using R.

The World Politics Data Lab is connected to a GitHub repository with access to all our datasets, codes, and outputs. Like many other academic data labs, we are committed to the principles of open science.