Worldwide Atrocities Dataset

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The Worldwide Atrocities Dataset is a dataset collected by the Computational Event Data System at Pennsylvania State University and sponsored by the Political Instability Task Force (PITF) that is, in turn, funded by the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States. [1]

Pennsylvania State University Public university with multiple campuses in Pennsylvania, United States

The Pennsylvania State University is a state-related, land-grant, doctoral university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvania. Founded in 1855 as the Farmers’ High School of Pennsylvania (FHS), and later known as the University of State College (USC), Penn State conducts teaching, research, and public service. Its instructional mission includes undergraduate, graduate, professional and continuing education offered through resident instruction and online delivery. Its University Park campus, the flagship campus, lies within the Borough of State College and College Township. It has two law schools: Penn State Law, on the school's University Park campus, and Dickinson Law, located in Carlisle, 90 miles south of State College. The College of Medicine is located in Hershey. Penn State has another 19 commonwealth campuses and 5 special mission campuses located across the state. Penn State has been labeled one of the "Public Ivies," a publicly funded university considered as providing a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.

The Political Instability Task Force (PITF), formerly known as State Failure Task Force, is a U.S. government-sponsored research project to build a database on major domestic political conflicts leading to state failures. The study analyzed factors to denote the effectiveness of state institutions, population well-being, and found that partial democracies with low involvement in international trade and with high infant mortality are most prone to revolutions. One of the members of the task force resigned on January 20, 2017 in protest of the Trump administration.

Central Intelligence Agency National intelligence agency of the United States

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT). As one of the principal members of the United States Intelligence Community (IC), the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence and is primarily focused on providing intelligence for the President and Cabinet of the United States.

Contents

Data

Unlike other datasets such as the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT), Integrated Conflict Early Warning System (ICEWS), data for the Worldwide Atrocities Dataset is entered and coded manually. [1] Data is available for download in two files: [1]

The Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT), created by Kalev Leetaru of Yahoo! and Georgetown University, along with Philip Schrodt and others, describes itself as "an initiative to construct a catalog of human societal-scale behavior and beliefs across all countries of the world, connecting every person, organization, location, count, theme, news source, and event across the planet into a single massive network that captures what's happening around the world, what its context is and who's involved, and how the world is feeling about it, every single day." Early explorations leading up to the creation of GDELT were described by co-creator Philip Schrodt in a conference paper in January 2011. The dataset is available on Google Cloud Platform.

The Integrated Conflict Early Warning System (ICEWS) combines a database of political events and a system using these to provide conflict early warnings. It is supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the United States. The database as well as the model used by Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories are currently undergoing operational test and evaluation by the United States Southern Command and United States Pacific Command.

In addition to the datasets, a coding manual is available for download. [2]

Reception

Academic reception

The Worldwide Atrocities Dataset has been referenced in academic research on the impact of climate change on violence in Africa. [3] It has also been referenced alongside the ACLED dataset and the Peacekeeping Operations Locations and Event Dataset in a paper on the geography of conflict by Wiedmann and Kuse (2009). [4] [5] A 2011 paper by Gold and Haar used the Worldwide Atrocities Dataset to understand the spatial dimension of refugee flows. [6]

Climate change Change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns for an extended period

Climate change occurs when changes in Earth's climate system result in new weather patterns that last for at least a few decades, and maybe for millions of years. The climate system is comprised of five interacting parts, the atmosphere (air), hydrosphere (water), cryosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere. The climate system receives nearly all of its energy from the sun, with a relatively tiny amount from earth's interior. The climate system also gives off energy to outer space. The balance of incoming and outgoing energy, and the passage of the energy through the climate system, determines Earth's energy budget. When the incoming energy is greater than the outgoing energy, earth's energy budget is positive and the climate system is warming. If more energy goes out, the energy budget is negative and earth experiences cooling.

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) is a non-governmental organization that collates and analyzes data on political violence and protest around the world. As of 2018, ACLED has recorded over 420,000 individual events across Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, and it is expanding coverage to include Europe and Latin America. It specializes in disaggregated conflict collection and crisis mapping. The ACLED team conducts analysis to describe, explore, and test conflict scenarios, and makes both data and analysis open for use by the public.

Reception in blogs

Political scientist and forecasting expert Jay Ulfelder called the Worldwide Atrocities Dataset a "useful data set on political violence that almost no one is using." [7] It was also referenced by Patrick Meier while reviewing a paper that used the dataset. [5]

Jay Ulfelder is a political scientist in the United States who works in the realm of political forecasting, specifically forecasting about political development and instability of different forms around the world. He maintains a blog titled Dart-Throwing Chimp that includes commentary on his work and on geopolitical forecasting at large. He is the former research director of the Political Instability Task Force commission by the Central Intelligence Agency.

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A geographic information system (GIS) is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present spatial or geographic data. GIS applications are tools that allow users to create interactive queries, analyze spatial information, edit data in pod maps, and present the results of all these operations. GIS sometimes refers to geographic information science (GIScience), the science underlying geographic concepts, applications, and systems.

R (programming language) programming language for statistical computing

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Geoinformatics is the science and the technology which develops and uses information science infrastructure to address the problems of geography, cartography, geosciences and related branches of science and engineering.

Geocoding is the computational process of transforming a physical address description to a location on the Earth's surface. Reverse geocoding, on the other hand, converts geographic coordinates to a description of a location, usually the name of a place or an addressable location. Geocoding relies on a computer representation of address points, the street / road network, together with postal and administrative boundaries.

Spatial analysis Formal techniques which study entities using their topological, geometric, or geographic properties

Spatial analysis or spatial statistics includes any of the formal techniques which study entities using their topological, geometric, or geographic properties. Spatial analysis includes a variety of techniques, many still in their early development, using different analytic approaches and applied in fields as diverse as astronomy, with its studies of the placement of galaxies in the cosmos, to chip fabrication engineering, with its use of "place and route" algorithms to build complex wiring structures. In a more restricted sense, spatial analysis is the technique applied to structures at the human scale, most notably in the analysis of geographic data.

Michael Don Ward is an American political scientist and academic. He is professor emeritus of political science at Duke University, an affiliate of the Duke Network Analysis Center, and the principal investigator at Ward Lab, a website that creates conflict predictions using Bayesian modeling and network analysis.

Visual analytics

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UCDP Conflict Encyclopedia

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MNIST database database of handwritten digits

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Global Terrorism Database

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Philip A. "Phil" Schrodt is a political scientist known for his work in automated data and event coding for political news. On August 1, 2013, he announced that he was leaving his job as professor at Pennsylvania State University to become a full-time consultant. Schrodt is currently a senior research scientist at the statistical consulting firm Parus Analytical Systems.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 "Political Instability Task Force Worldwide Atrocities Dataset". Computational Event Data System maintained by Parus Analytical Systems for Pennsylvania State University. June 5, 2014. Retrieved June 21, 2014.
  2. ↑ "Coding manual for Worldwide Atrocities Dataset" (PDF). Retrieved June 21, 2014.
  3. ↑ Busby, Joshua W.; Smith, Todd G.; White, Kaiba L.; Strange, Shawn M. (2012). "Locating Climate Insecurity: Where Are the Most Vulnerable Places in Africa?". Climate Change, Human Security and Violent Conflict, Hexagon Series on Human and Environmental Security and Peace. 8: 463–511. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-28626-1_23.
  4. ↑ Weidmann, Nils B.; Kuse, Doreen (2009). "WarViews: Visualizing and Animating Geographic Data on Civil War". International Studies Perspectives . 10: 36–48.
  5. 1 2 Meier, Patrick (February 24, 2009). "NeoGeography and Crisis Mapping Analytics" . Retrieved June 21, 2014.
  6. ↑ Gold, Valentin; Haer, Ross (May 2011). "The Diffusion of Atrocities: A Spatial Analysis of the Role of Refugees" (PDF). Network of European Peace Scientists . Retrieved June 21, 2014.
  7. ↑ Ulfelder, Jay (June 10, 2014). "A Useful Data Set on Political Violence that Almost No One Is Using" . Retrieved June 21, 2014.

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