Solomon Islands Elections Data
Data painstakingly collected by Terrence Wood as part of his PhD, on every election in Solomon Islands since the dawn of independence.
This is a great example of a complex dataset that has been complied, cleaned and standardised. Yes, all this information is already in the public domain, but it becomes more valuable when brought together in one consistent and searchable dataset. But the ‘last mile’ in accessibility is moving the data from this dense and precise Excel sheet on the right to a visualisation, giving what you see below.
As well as making the data easier to understand and to interrogate, using visualisations puts the data out there in a format the is visually appealing, is non-challenging – even I hope to the most technophobe. And ultimately can preserve it on the internet for people to access in the future. Without visualisation, this data would still be publicly accessible – to anyone who wanted to arrange an inter-library loan of Terrence’s PhD thesis from the vaults of the Australian National University.
Election geeks rejoice!