I thought you might be interested in a newly updated dataset of almost 10
million individually coded international events (1990-2004). Each event is
summarized in the data as "Actor A does something to Actor B", with Actors A
and B coded for about 450 countries (and other actors) and "does something to"
coded in an ontology of about 200 types of actions. The data are coded by a
computer "reading" millions of Reuters news reports. Will Lowe and I wrote an
article* that evaluated the software system (produced by VRA) that performs
this task and found that for the numbers of events it was possible to convince
humans (trained Harvard undergraduates) to coded by hand, the machine did as
well as the humans. However, in part since there is only so much pizza you can
feed undergraduates, the machine clearly dominates for larger numbers of
events. We previously released a dataset with 3.5 million events; this one is
bigger, more accurate (since the software has been improved), and covers a
longer time period.
Most international relations data are limited to analyses aggregated to the
year or month. Yet, as we say in the article, when the Palestinians launch a
mortar attack into Israel, the Israeli army does not wait until the end of the
calendar year to react. We think there is much to be learned about
international relations from data like these.
For the data, documentation, and our article, see
http://gking.harvard.edu/events/
Gary
*Gary King and Will Lowe. 2003. "An Automated Information Extraction
Tool For International Conflict Data with Performance as Good as Human
Coders: A Rare Events Evaluation Design" <em>International
Organization</em>, 57, 3 (July, 2003): Pp. 617-642.
---
Gary King
David Florence Professor of Government,
Director, Institute for Quantitative Social Science
Harvard University, 1737 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA 02138
http://GKing.Harvard.Edu, [log in to unmask]
Direct 617-495-2027, Assistant 495-9271, eFax 812-8581
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