Activities & Achievements

"Big data" in the form of unstructured text poses challenges and opportunities to social scientists committed to advancing research frontiers. Because machine-based and humancentric approaches to content analysis have different strengths for extracting information from unstructured text, we…

The Merriam Scholars Program was a program funded by the Merriam Endowment in which two faculty members, chosen by the Cline Center, were annual appointed as Merriam Scholars. Due to the terms of the Merriam Endowment appointments were limited to members of the Political Science faculty at the…

This grant funds a proof-of-concept study for an authoritative national database of police-involved shootings. It aims to demonstrate machine learning technologies to detect and classify stories about these events and help to establish whether systemic bias exists, its implications, and how it…

This document outlines the procedures and criteria used to delineate episodes of civil strife for 164 countries in the world for the period from January 1, 1946 to December 31, 2005. Prior research has been handicapped by a lack of data on civil strife events and defensible criteria for…

This article examines the destabilizing impact of rapid-onset, climate-related disasters. It uses a sample of storms and floods in conjunction with two intensity measures of civil unrest to examine two perspectives on human reactions to disasters (conflictual, cooperative). It also uses insights…

Coup d'états are important events in the life of a country. They constitute an important subset of irregular transfers of political power that can have important and enduring consequences for a country’s well-being. This notwithstanding, a comprehensive and well-documented inventory of coups has…

News media provide a unique source of information on important societal developments, both contemporary and historical. Consequently, over the past forty years, social scientists have attempted to utilize media data to study important questions in a number of fields. But these efforts have been…

This article outlines an effort to gauge cross-national and inter-temporal differences in law-based orders for 165 nations from 1850 to 2010. Despite the increasing importance attributed to “the rule of law,” there have been few efforts to develop objective measures of it. The conceptual…

This document provides an introduction to, and an overview of, the SPEED Project's Societal Stability Protocol (SSP).  The SSP's aim is to generate event data that will advance our understanding of civil unrest in the post-WWII era.  The SSP's focus is on human-initiated destabilizing…

The 2018 Collaborative Research on Extreme-Scale Text Analytics (CRESTA) workshop was held on February 1-4, 2018, on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. The theme for this workshop was “Text Analytics Applications for Monitoring and
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This study set out to analyze demographic characteristics of criminal suspects included in crime reporting published by the Champaign (Illinois) News-Gazette newspaper, and to compare the demographics of suspects in the news to the demographics of suspects arrested or jailed in Champaign County…

SPEED is a technology-intensive effort to collect a comprehensive body of global event data for the Post WWII era. It is a protocol-driven system that was designed to provide insights into key behavioral patterns and relationships that are valid across countries and over time. SPEED's Societal…

Educational attainment is both a driver of developmental processes and a key indicator of human development. Yet cross-national data on educational attainment for the post WWII era is spotty, despite significant efforts by the UN and several highly respected academic teams to compile it.…

Since so few people appear knowledgeable about public affairs, one might question whether collective policy preferences revealed in opinion surveys accurately convey the distribution of voices and interests in a society. Scott Althaus' comprehensive analysis of the relationship between knowledge…

Creating a valid and reliable body of event data requires meeting a number of challenges (clearly defining the events to be studied, developing reliable sources of information on those events, identifying source documents with relevant information, etc.). The fact that most event data projects,…