Global News Index & Archer

The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research develops innovative tools and datasets to advance research and understanding of global events. Two key initiatives—the Global News Index (GNI) and Archer—offer powerful ways to explore worldwide news coverage.  With these tools, researchers can:

• Track trends in global English-language news coverage.
• Conduct comparative studies across regions and time periods.
• Visualize and interpret complex datasets for social science research.

Together, GNI and Archer demonstrate how raw data can be harnessed to generate meaningful, real-world research impact.

Archer is currently available to the University of Illinois faculty, staff, and students. Researchers can request access via email at cline-center@illinois.edu.

Global News Index

The Global News Index (GNI) is a searchable index of news articles from around the world that allows users to download extracted features that have been pre-computed from full-text records at the level of specific articles. It allows researchers to explore global media coverage, identify trends, and analyze patterns in reporting.

Key Features:

• Extensive historical and contemporary coverage of English-language news from around the world, including over 190 million unduplicated news stories from 1945 to today.
• Extracted features and metadata for deeper analysis of events.
• Visualization and query tools to support a wide range of research topics.

• Non-consumptive access only: Due to copyright and licensing requirements, while Archer users can search the full text of news reports, they can only visualize and download features that have been pre-extracted from full-text news data, without ever having access to full-text content. Although it is not possible to access full-text content through Archer, users can download URLs and metadata (e.g., headlines, publication dates) that may allow them to locate full-text content outside of the Archer system. 

  

Archer: Accessing the Global News Index

Archer is a web application designed to provide both user-friendly and advanced access to the GNI. It enables:

• Visual queries: Build searches using icons, drop-down menus, and facets.
• Raw queries: Use Lucene syntax for advanced query construction.
• Visualizations: Generate dynamic charts and graphs to explore faceted results.
• Data downloads: Download metadata and extracted features from query results for further analysis outside the Archer application.

GNI/Archer Resources

• Archer Quick Start

• Archer User Manual

• GNI Codebook

• GNI Quick Reference Table

• GNI Random Sample

For more information, please visit the following Illinois Databank page.