Dear colleagues,

I'd like to bring to your attention a new, free data resource on the
Russian Invasion of Ukraine.

A few days ago I set up a near-real time violent event tracking system on
the conflict, which scrapes and parses news reports from Ukrainian and
Russian media, geocodes them, and classifies them into standard conflict
event categories (e.g. firefight, artillery shelling) through machine
learning.

I am now making these data publicly available through GitHub:
https://github.com/zhukovyuri/VIINA

These data are GIS-ready, with temporal precision down to the minute. Each
observation is accompanied by full source information, text and URLs.

This resource will be updated regularly (daily), and is freely available
for use by students, journalists, policymakers, and everyday researchers.

Data sources currently include news wires, TV stations, newspapers, and
online publications in both countries. I will be updating and expanding
these sources as the conflict unfolds, to include OSINT social media feeds
and other key sources.

I wanted to make these data available immediately because media sites in
both countries are already being shut down, due to either censorship (in
Russia) or military operations (in Ukraine). It is thus essential that
researchers have access to information about the war, as reported across
media organizations and other actors in the information space. A
multi-source focus is also important because different media tend to
emphasize different types and numbers of events (e.g. Russian media has
been covering this war mainly as local operation in the Donbas, Ukrainian
media offer a far more exhaustive picture).

I hope this resource will be useful to anyone looking for up-to-date,
relatively comprehensive information about who is doing what, to whom,
when, where, and how.

Corrections, feedback welcome: zhukov-at-umich-dot-edu.

Best,
Yuri


Yuri M. Zhukov
Associate Professor of Political Science
Research Associate Professor, Center for Political Studies
Institute for Social Research
University of Michigan
Email: [log in to unmask]
Website: http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/zhukov

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