The Cline Center Global News Index is a searchable database of textual features extracted from mi... more The Cline Center Global News Index is a searchable database of textual features extracted from millions of news stories, specifically designed to provide comprehensive coverage of events around the world. In addition to searching documents for keywords, users can query metadata and features such as named entities extracted using Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and variables that measure sentiment and emotional valence. Archer is a web application purpose-built by the Cline Center to enable researchers to access data from the Global News Index. Archer provides a user-friendly interface for querying the Global News Index (with the back-end indexing still handled by Solr). By default, queries are built using icons and drop-down menus. More technically-savvy users can use Lucene/Solr query syntax via a 'raw query' option. Archer allows users to save and iterate on their queries, and to visualize faceted query results, which can be helpful for users as they refine their...
Sixty-seven years ago, oil starved Japan embarked on an aggressive expansionary policy designed t... more Sixty-seven years ago, oil starved Japan embarked on an aggressive expansionary policy designed to secure its growing energy needs, which eventually led the nation into a world war. Today, another Asian power thirsts for oil: China-Luft Gal 1 Key Asian powers increasingly compete in the same producing areas and countries.-They are choosing bilateral approaches that link energy trade, and often military cooperation rather than multilateral and market approaches.-A type of 'energy nationalism" appears to be setting in" Mikkal E. Herberg 2 In a world in which the supply of oil is limited both by geology and politics, China's determination to fuel its rapidly growing economy is seen by many as a looming source of conflict. It is not simply the geographic breadth of China's initiatives that cause anxiety in western capitals, but also its willingness to enter into economic arrangements with "rogue" states. Unfettered by concerns about human rights and willing to link oil investments with foreign policy goals, critics believe that China has been able to gain an unfair advantage in the competition for both oil and regional influence. They point to China's budding relationship with nations such as Angola, Sudan, and Venezuela. Is this concern warranted? Do China's recent initiatives augur a future replete with tensions over access to oil? What motivates Chinese oil policy and are its policies inevitably in conflict with long term western interests? Unfortunately the answers are complicated and are clouded by incomplete data and conflicting signals. One can find evidence to support almost any particular argument. A number of factors influence Chinese policy, and these are often uncoordinated and sometimes in conflict. This paper attempts to identify and unravel several of these and to explore how they have manifested themselves in China's relationship with one region: the Middle East. Definitive conclusions and simple paradigms may be beyond our reach given the evidence, information and data that we have at our disposal, but we have attempted to provide a more nuanced assessment of China's past oil investments in the hope that a better understanding of these initiatives will broaden and enhance the debate.
The outcome of ongoing debates over the future of American military strategy will play a critical... more The outcome of ongoing debates over the future of American military strategy will play a critical role in shaping the foreign and military policies of the United States over the next decade. Traditionalists worry about the shift towards emphasizing counterinsurgency (COIN) operations and irregular warfare, believing that the use of force is often ineffective in COIN situations and the American military should concentrate on planning for conventional war. In contrast, COIN advocates argue that the United States must focus its efforts on preparing for the wars it is most likely to fight, irregular wars. However, both schools of thought rely on assumptions about the future security environment that may reveal another path forward. First, although it seems intuitive to view irregular warfare as the dominant future concern, it is exceedingly difficult to predict accurately the future security environment, as the last 20 years have clearly shown. Second, and perhaps most importantly, the character of emergent threats will depend on how the United States focuses its resources. Paradoxically, no matter what it emphasizes, the military threats the United States is or will be most capable of defeating are the ones it is least likely to face, since potential adversaries will be deterred and seek other ways of confrontation. However, with some smart and careful investments, including the recognition that not all parts of the military have to be optimized for the same task, the United States military can both lock in its conventional dominance and continue to improve its ability to succeed in the irregular wars most likely to dominate the landscape in the short to medium term.
Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 2007
Page 1. By Henry Lee and Dan A. Shalmon ... Sinopec's withdrawal from the Neka-Tehran pi... more Page 1. By Henry Lee and Dan A. Shalmon ... Sinopec's withdrawal from the Neka-Tehran pipeline project and its on-again, off-again discussions around the development of the Yadavaran field are indications of the challenges of doing business with the existing Irani-an regime. ...
Pressured by skyrocketing demand, Chinese oil companies have branched out across the globe seekin... more Pressured by skyrocketing demand, Chinese oil companies have branched out across the globe seeking new oil supplies to feed the country's economic growth. By 2006, China had made oil investments in almost every part of the world, including Africa. These initiatives ...
Digital archives that document real-world events provide new opportunities for large-scale analys... more Digital archives that document real-world events provide new opportunities for large-scale analyses of how news coverage represents reality. We present a method and open-source tool for linking eve...
Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-abs-10.1177_00027642211021635 for A Total Error Approach for Vali... more Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-abs-10.1177_00027642211021635 for A Total Error Approach for Validating Event Data by Scott Althaus, Buddy Peyton and Dan Shalmon in American Behavioral Scientist
This is part of the Cline Center's ongoing Social, Political and Economic Event Database Proj... more This is part of the Cline Center's ongoing Social, Political and Economic Event Database Project (SPEED) project. Each observation represents an event involving civil unrest, repression, or political violence in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Philippines (1979-2009). These data were produced in an effort to describe the relationship between exploitation of natural resources and civil conflict, and to identify policy interventions that might address resource-related grievances and mitigate civil strife. This work is the result of a collaboration between the US Army Corps of Engineers' Construction Engineer Research Laboratory (ERDC-CERL), the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) and the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research (CCASR). The project team selected case studies focused on nations with a long history of civil conflict, as well as lucrative natural resources. The Cline Center extracted these events from country-specific articles published in English by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB) from 1979-2008 and the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) 1999-2004. Articles were selected if they mentioned a country of interest, and were tagged as relevant by a Cline Center-built machine learning-based classification algorithm. Trained analysts extracted nearly 10,000 events from nearly 5,000 documents. The codebook—available in PDF form below—describes the data and production process in greater detail.
Coups d'état are important events in the life of a country. They constitute an important subs... more Coups d'état are important events in the life of a country. They constitute an important subset of irregular transfers of political power that can have significant and enduring consequences for national well-being. There are only a limited number of datasets available to study these events (Powell and Thyne 2011, Marshall and Marshall 2019). Seeking to facilitate research on post-WWII coups by compiling a more comprehensive list and categorization of these events, the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research (previously the Cline Center for Democracy) initiated the Coup D'état Project (CDP) as part of its Societal Infrastructures and Development (SID) project. More specifically, this dataset identifies the outcomes of coup events (i.e. realized or successful coups, unrealized coup attempts, or thwarted conspiracies) the type of actor(s) who initiated the coup (i.e. military, rebels, etc.), as well as the fate of the deposed leader. This is version 2.0.0 of this dataset. The first version, v.1.0.0, was released in 2013. Since then, the Cline Center has taken several steps to improve on the previously-released data. These changes include: Filling in missing event data values Removing events with no identifiable dates Reconciling event dates from sources that have conflicting information Removing events with insufficient sourcing (each event now has at least two sources) Removing events that were inaccurately coded and did not meet our definition of a coup event Extending the time period covered from 1945-2005 to 1945-2019 Removing certain variables that fell below the threshold of inter-coder reliability required by the project The spreadsheet 'CoupInventory.xls' was removed because of inadequate attribution and citation in the event summaries <b>Items in this Dataset</b> 1. <i>CDP v.2.0.2 Codebook.pdf</i> This 14-page document provides a description of the Cline Center Coup D'état Project Dataset. The first section of this codebook provides a succinct definition of a coup d'état used by the CDP and an overview of [...]
These data and code enable replication of the findings and robustness checks in "No buzz for... more These data and code enable replication of the findings and robustness checks in "No buzz for bees: Media coverage of pollinator decline," published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2020)". In this paper, we find that although widespread declines in insect biomass and diversity are increasing concern within the scientific community, it remains unclear whether attention to pollinator declines has also increased within information sources serving the general public. Examining patterns of journalistic attention to the pollinator population crisis can also inform efforts to raise awareness about the importance of declines of insect species providing ecosystem services beyond pollination. We used the Global News Index developed by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to track news attention to pollinator topics in nearly 25 million news items published by two American national newspapers and four international wire services over the past four decades. We provide a link to documentation of the Global News Index in the "relationships with articles, code, o. We found vanishingly low levels of attention to pollinator population topics relative to coverage of climate change, which we use as a comparison topic. In the most recent subset of ~10 million stories published from 2007 to 2019, 1.39% (137,086 stories) refer to climate change/global warming, while only 0.02% (1,780) refer to pollinator populations in all contexts and just 0.007% (679) refer to pollinator declines. Substantial increases in news attention were detectable only in U.S. national newspapers. We also find that while climate change stories appear primarily in newspaper "front sections", pollinator population stories remain largely marginalized in "science" and "back section" reports. At the same time, news reports about pollinator populations increasingly link the issue to climate change, which might ultimately help raise public awareness to effect [...]
Terrorism is among the most pressing challenges to democratic governance around the world. The Re... more Terrorism is among the most pressing challenges to democratic governance around the world. The Responsible Terrorism Coverage (or ResTeCo) project aims to address a fundamental dilemma facing 21st century societies: how to give citizens the information they need without giving terrorists the kind of attention they want. The ResTeCo hopes to inform best practices by using extreme-scale text analytic methods to extract information from more than 70 years of terrorism-related media coverage from around the world and across 5 languages. Our goal is to expand the available data on media responses to terrorism and enable the development of empirically-validated models for socially responsible, effective news organizations. This particular dataset contains information extracted from terrorism-related stories in the Summary of World Broadcasts published between 1979 and 2019. It includes variables that measure the relative share of terrorism-related topics, the valence and intensity of emotional language, as well as the people, places, and organizations mentioned. This dataset contains 3 files: 1. "ResTeCo Project SWB Dataset Variable Descriptions.pdf" A detailed codebook containing a summary of the Responsible Terrorism Coverage (ResTeCo) Project BBC Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB) Dataset and descriptions of all variables. 2. "resteco-swb.csv" This file contains the data extracted from terrorism-related media coverage in the BBC Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB) between 1979 and 2019. It includes variables that measure the relative share of topics, sentiment, and emotion present in this coverage. There are also variables that contain metadata and list the people, places, and organizations mentioned in these articles. There are 53 variables and 438,373 observations. The variable "id" uniquely identifies each observation. Each observation represents a single news article. Please note that care should be taken when using "resteco-swb.csv". The file may not be suitable to use in a spreadsheet program like Excel as some o [...]
The Cline Center Historical Phoenix Event Data covers the period 1945-2018 and includes several m... more The Cline Center Historical Phoenix Event Data covers the period 1945-2018 and includes several million events extracted from 17.5 million news stories. This data was produced using the state-of-the-art PETRARCH-2 software to analyze content from the New York Times (1945-2019), the BBC Monitoring's Summary of World Broadcasts (1979-2015) and the Central Intelligence Agency's Foreign Broadcast Information Service (1995-2004). It documents the agents, locations, and issues at stake in a wide variety of conflict, cooperation and communicative events in the CAMEO ontology. The Cline Center produced this data with the generous support of Linowes Fellow and Faculty Affiliate Prof. Dov Cohen and help from our academic and private sector collaborators in the Open Event Data Alliance (OEDA).
Understanding how useful any particular set of event data might be for conflict research requires... more Understanding how useful any particular set of event data might be for conflict research requires appropriate methods for assessing validity when ground truth data about the population of interest do not exist. We argue that a total error framework can provide better leverage on these critical questions than previous methods have been able to deliver. We first define a total event data error approach for identifying 19 types of error that can affect the validity of event data. We then address the challenge of applying a total error framework when authoritative ground truth about the actual distribution of relevant events is lacking. We argue that carefully constructed gold standard datasets can effectively benchmark validity problems even in the absence of ground truth data about event populations. To illustrate the limitations of conventional strategies for validating event data, we present a case study of Boko Haram activity in Nigeria over a 3-month offensive in 2015 that compare...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021
Although widespread declines in insect biomass and diversity are increasing concerns within the s... more Although widespread declines in insect biomass and diversity are increasing concerns within the scientific community, it remains unclear whether attention to pollinator declines has also increased within information sources serving the general public. Examining patterns of journalistic attention to the pollinator population crisis can also inform efforts to raise awareness about the importance of declines of insect species providing ecosystem services beyond pollination. We used the Global News Index developed by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign to track news attention to pollinator topics in nearly 25 million news items published by two American national newspapers and four international wire services over the past four decades. We found vanishingly low levels of attention to pollinator population topics relative to coverage of climate change, which we use as a comparison topic. In the most recent subset of ∼10 million ...
Codebook and Dataset by Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, 2019
The Cline Center Historical Phoenix Event Data covers the period 1945-2018 and includes several m... more The Cline Center Historical Phoenix Event Data covers the period 1945-2018 and includes several million events extracted from 17.5 million news stories. This data was produced using the state-of-the-art PETRARCH-2 software to analyze content from the New York Times (1945-2019), the BBC Monitoring's Summary of World Broadcasts (1979-2015) and the Central Intelligence Agency’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (1995-2004). It documents the agents, locations, and issues at stake in a wide variety of conflict, cooperation and communicative events in the CAMEO ontology. The Cline Center produced this data with the generous support of Linowes Fellow and Faculty Affiliate Prof. Dov Cohen and help from our academic and private sector collaborators in the Open Event Data Alliance (OEDA).
Pressured by skyrocketing demand, Chinese oil companies have branched out across the globe seekin... more Pressured by skyrocketing demand, Chinese oil companies have branched out across the globe seeking new oil supplies to feed the country’s economic growth. By 2006, China had made oil investments in almost every part of the world, including Africa. These initiatives have not been without controversy. From the commercial perspective, Western companies complain that China’s ability to link its oil investments to government-to-government financial assistance gives its companies an unfair advantage. From the political perspective, Western nongovernmental organizations have accused China of using its investments to support some of the more abusive, corrupt, and violent governments in the world. The poster child for this argument has been China’s support for the Sudanese government and its unwillingness to condemn publicly the genocidal practices of the janjaweed militias operating in Darfur. China’s repeated contention that it does not get involved in domestic politics and that its relationships with African governments is strictly commercial is perceived by many as hollow. Critics argue that without China’s investments and tacit support, African governments, such as the Sudan’s, would be forced to amend their behavior. This chapter looks at the validity of these arguments and how they are manifested on the African continent. It focuses on China’s activities in the Sudan and Angola, not only because they are the largest measured, both in terms of dollar value and scope, but because they incorporate features that characterize Chinese efforts to secure incremental oil supplies from African countries.
The outcome of ongoing debates over the future of American military strategy will play a critical... more The outcome of ongoing debates over the future of American military strategy will play a critical role in shaping the foreign and military policies of the United States over the next decade. Traditionalists worry about the shift towards emphasizing counterinsurgency (COIN) operations and irregular warfare, believing that the use of force is often ineffective in COIN situations and the American military should concentrate on planning for conventional war. In contrast, COIN advocates argue that the United States must focus its efforts on preparing for the wars it is most likely to fight, irregular wars. However, both schools of thought rely on assumptions about the future security environment that may reveal another path forward. First, although it seems intuitive to view irregular warfare as the dominant future concern, it is exceedingly difficult to predict accurately the future security environment, as the last 20 years have clearly shown. Second, and perhaps most importantly, the character of emergent threats will depend on how the United States focuses its resources. Paradoxically, no matter what it emphasizes, the military threats the United States is or will be most capable of defeating are the ones it is least likely to face, since potential adversaries will be deterred and seek other ways of confrontation. However, with some smart and careful investments, including the recognition that not all parts of the military have to be optimized for the same task, the United States military can both lock in its conventional dominance and continue to improve its ability to succeed in the irregular wars most likely to dominate the landscape in the short to medium term.
The Cline Center Global News Index is a searchable database of textual features extracted from mi... more The Cline Center Global News Index is a searchable database of textual features extracted from millions of news stories, specifically designed to provide comprehensive coverage of events around the world. In addition to searching documents for keywords, users can query metadata and features such as named entities extracted using Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and variables that measure sentiment and emotional valence. Archer is a web application purpose-built by the Cline Center to enable researchers to access data from the Global News Index. Archer provides a user-friendly interface for querying the Global News Index (with the back-end indexing still handled by Solr). By default, queries are built using icons and drop-down menus. More technically-savvy users can use Lucene/Solr query syntax via a 'raw query' option. Archer allows users to save and iterate on their queries, and to visualize faceted query results, which can be helpful for users as they refine their...
Sixty-seven years ago, oil starved Japan embarked on an aggressive expansionary policy designed t... more Sixty-seven years ago, oil starved Japan embarked on an aggressive expansionary policy designed to secure its growing energy needs, which eventually led the nation into a world war. Today, another Asian power thirsts for oil: China-Luft Gal 1 Key Asian powers increasingly compete in the same producing areas and countries.-They are choosing bilateral approaches that link energy trade, and often military cooperation rather than multilateral and market approaches.-A type of 'energy nationalism" appears to be setting in" Mikkal E. Herberg 2 In a world in which the supply of oil is limited both by geology and politics, China's determination to fuel its rapidly growing economy is seen by many as a looming source of conflict. It is not simply the geographic breadth of China's initiatives that cause anxiety in western capitals, but also its willingness to enter into economic arrangements with "rogue" states. Unfettered by concerns about human rights and willing to link oil investments with foreign policy goals, critics believe that China has been able to gain an unfair advantage in the competition for both oil and regional influence. They point to China's budding relationship with nations such as Angola, Sudan, and Venezuela. Is this concern warranted? Do China's recent initiatives augur a future replete with tensions over access to oil? What motivates Chinese oil policy and are its policies inevitably in conflict with long term western interests? Unfortunately the answers are complicated and are clouded by incomplete data and conflicting signals. One can find evidence to support almost any particular argument. A number of factors influence Chinese policy, and these are often uncoordinated and sometimes in conflict. This paper attempts to identify and unravel several of these and to explore how they have manifested themselves in China's relationship with one region: the Middle East. Definitive conclusions and simple paradigms may be beyond our reach given the evidence, information and data that we have at our disposal, but we have attempted to provide a more nuanced assessment of China's past oil investments in the hope that a better understanding of these initiatives will broaden and enhance the debate.
The outcome of ongoing debates over the future of American military strategy will play a critical... more The outcome of ongoing debates over the future of American military strategy will play a critical role in shaping the foreign and military policies of the United States over the next decade. Traditionalists worry about the shift towards emphasizing counterinsurgency (COIN) operations and irregular warfare, believing that the use of force is often ineffective in COIN situations and the American military should concentrate on planning for conventional war. In contrast, COIN advocates argue that the United States must focus its efforts on preparing for the wars it is most likely to fight, irregular wars. However, both schools of thought rely on assumptions about the future security environment that may reveal another path forward. First, although it seems intuitive to view irregular warfare as the dominant future concern, it is exceedingly difficult to predict accurately the future security environment, as the last 20 years have clearly shown. Second, and perhaps most importantly, the character of emergent threats will depend on how the United States focuses its resources. Paradoxically, no matter what it emphasizes, the military threats the United States is or will be most capable of defeating are the ones it is least likely to face, since potential adversaries will be deterred and seek other ways of confrontation. However, with some smart and careful investments, including the recognition that not all parts of the military have to be optimized for the same task, the United States military can both lock in its conventional dominance and continue to improve its ability to succeed in the irregular wars most likely to dominate the landscape in the short to medium term.
Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 2007
Page 1. By Henry Lee and Dan A. Shalmon ... Sinopec&#x27;s withdrawal from the Neka-Tehran pi... more Page 1. By Henry Lee and Dan A. Shalmon ... Sinopec&#x27;s withdrawal from the Neka-Tehran pipeline project and its on-again, off-again discussions around the development of the Yadavaran field are indications of the challenges of doing business with the existing Irani-an regime. ...
Pressured by skyrocketing demand, Chinese oil companies have branched out across the globe seekin... more Pressured by skyrocketing demand, Chinese oil companies have branched out across the globe seeking new oil supplies to feed the country's economic growth. By 2006, China had made oil investments in almost every part of the world, including Africa. These initiatives ...
Digital archives that document real-world events provide new opportunities for large-scale analys... more Digital archives that document real-world events provide new opportunities for large-scale analyses of how news coverage represents reality. We present a method and open-source tool for linking eve...
Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-abs-10.1177_00027642211021635 for A Total Error Approach for Vali... more Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-abs-10.1177_00027642211021635 for A Total Error Approach for Validating Event Data by Scott Althaus, Buddy Peyton and Dan Shalmon in American Behavioral Scientist
This is part of the Cline Center's ongoing Social, Political and Economic Event Database Proj... more This is part of the Cline Center's ongoing Social, Political and Economic Event Database Project (SPEED) project. Each observation represents an event involving civil unrest, repression, or political violence in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Philippines (1979-2009). These data were produced in an effort to describe the relationship between exploitation of natural resources and civil conflict, and to identify policy interventions that might address resource-related grievances and mitigate civil strife. This work is the result of a collaboration between the US Army Corps of Engineers' Construction Engineer Research Laboratory (ERDC-CERL), the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) and the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research (CCASR). The project team selected case studies focused on nations with a long history of civil conflict, as well as lucrative natural resources. The Cline Center extracted these events from country-specific articles published in English by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB) from 1979-2008 and the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) 1999-2004. Articles were selected if they mentioned a country of interest, and were tagged as relevant by a Cline Center-built machine learning-based classification algorithm. Trained analysts extracted nearly 10,000 events from nearly 5,000 documents. The codebook—available in PDF form below—describes the data and production process in greater detail.
Coups d'état are important events in the life of a country. They constitute an important subs... more Coups d'état are important events in the life of a country. They constitute an important subset of irregular transfers of political power that can have significant and enduring consequences for national well-being. There are only a limited number of datasets available to study these events (Powell and Thyne 2011, Marshall and Marshall 2019). Seeking to facilitate research on post-WWII coups by compiling a more comprehensive list and categorization of these events, the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research (previously the Cline Center for Democracy) initiated the Coup D'état Project (CDP) as part of its Societal Infrastructures and Development (SID) project. More specifically, this dataset identifies the outcomes of coup events (i.e. realized or successful coups, unrealized coup attempts, or thwarted conspiracies) the type of actor(s) who initiated the coup (i.e. military, rebels, etc.), as well as the fate of the deposed leader. This is version 2.0.0 of this dataset. The first version, v.1.0.0, was released in 2013. Since then, the Cline Center has taken several steps to improve on the previously-released data. These changes include: Filling in missing event data values Removing events with no identifiable dates Reconciling event dates from sources that have conflicting information Removing events with insufficient sourcing (each event now has at least two sources) Removing events that were inaccurately coded and did not meet our definition of a coup event Extending the time period covered from 1945-2005 to 1945-2019 Removing certain variables that fell below the threshold of inter-coder reliability required by the project The spreadsheet 'CoupInventory.xls' was removed because of inadequate attribution and citation in the event summaries <b>Items in this Dataset</b> 1. <i>CDP v.2.0.2 Codebook.pdf</i> This 14-page document provides a description of the Cline Center Coup D'état Project Dataset. The first section of this codebook provides a succinct definition of a coup d'état used by the CDP and an overview of [...]
These data and code enable replication of the findings and robustness checks in "No buzz for... more These data and code enable replication of the findings and robustness checks in "No buzz for bees: Media coverage of pollinator decline," published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2020)". In this paper, we find that although widespread declines in insect biomass and diversity are increasing concern within the scientific community, it remains unclear whether attention to pollinator declines has also increased within information sources serving the general public. Examining patterns of journalistic attention to the pollinator population crisis can also inform efforts to raise awareness about the importance of declines of insect species providing ecosystem services beyond pollination. We used the Global News Index developed by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to track news attention to pollinator topics in nearly 25 million news items published by two American national newspapers and four international wire services over the past four decades. We provide a link to documentation of the Global News Index in the "relationships with articles, code, o. We found vanishingly low levels of attention to pollinator population topics relative to coverage of climate change, which we use as a comparison topic. In the most recent subset of ~10 million stories published from 2007 to 2019, 1.39% (137,086 stories) refer to climate change/global warming, while only 0.02% (1,780) refer to pollinator populations in all contexts and just 0.007% (679) refer to pollinator declines. Substantial increases in news attention were detectable only in U.S. national newspapers. We also find that while climate change stories appear primarily in newspaper "front sections", pollinator population stories remain largely marginalized in "science" and "back section" reports. At the same time, news reports about pollinator populations increasingly link the issue to climate change, which might ultimately help raise public awareness to effect [...]
Terrorism is among the most pressing challenges to democratic governance around the world. The Re... more Terrorism is among the most pressing challenges to democratic governance around the world. The Responsible Terrorism Coverage (or ResTeCo) project aims to address a fundamental dilemma facing 21st century societies: how to give citizens the information they need without giving terrorists the kind of attention they want. The ResTeCo hopes to inform best practices by using extreme-scale text analytic methods to extract information from more than 70 years of terrorism-related media coverage from around the world and across 5 languages. Our goal is to expand the available data on media responses to terrorism and enable the development of empirically-validated models for socially responsible, effective news organizations. This particular dataset contains information extracted from terrorism-related stories in the Summary of World Broadcasts published between 1979 and 2019. It includes variables that measure the relative share of terrorism-related topics, the valence and intensity of emotional language, as well as the people, places, and organizations mentioned. This dataset contains 3 files: 1. "ResTeCo Project SWB Dataset Variable Descriptions.pdf" A detailed codebook containing a summary of the Responsible Terrorism Coverage (ResTeCo) Project BBC Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB) Dataset and descriptions of all variables. 2. "resteco-swb.csv" This file contains the data extracted from terrorism-related media coverage in the BBC Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB) between 1979 and 2019. It includes variables that measure the relative share of topics, sentiment, and emotion present in this coverage. There are also variables that contain metadata and list the people, places, and organizations mentioned in these articles. There are 53 variables and 438,373 observations. The variable "id" uniquely identifies each observation. Each observation represents a single news article. Please note that care should be taken when using "resteco-swb.csv". The file may not be suitable to use in a spreadsheet program like Excel as some o [...]
The Cline Center Historical Phoenix Event Data covers the period 1945-2018 and includes several m... more The Cline Center Historical Phoenix Event Data covers the period 1945-2018 and includes several million events extracted from 17.5 million news stories. This data was produced using the state-of-the-art PETRARCH-2 software to analyze content from the New York Times (1945-2019), the BBC Monitoring's Summary of World Broadcasts (1979-2015) and the Central Intelligence Agency's Foreign Broadcast Information Service (1995-2004). It documents the agents, locations, and issues at stake in a wide variety of conflict, cooperation and communicative events in the CAMEO ontology. The Cline Center produced this data with the generous support of Linowes Fellow and Faculty Affiliate Prof. Dov Cohen and help from our academic and private sector collaborators in the Open Event Data Alliance (OEDA).
Understanding how useful any particular set of event data might be for conflict research requires... more Understanding how useful any particular set of event data might be for conflict research requires appropriate methods for assessing validity when ground truth data about the population of interest do not exist. We argue that a total error framework can provide better leverage on these critical questions than previous methods have been able to deliver. We first define a total event data error approach for identifying 19 types of error that can affect the validity of event data. We then address the challenge of applying a total error framework when authoritative ground truth about the actual distribution of relevant events is lacking. We argue that carefully constructed gold standard datasets can effectively benchmark validity problems even in the absence of ground truth data about event populations. To illustrate the limitations of conventional strategies for validating event data, we present a case study of Boko Haram activity in Nigeria over a 3-month offensive in 2015 that compare...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021
Although widespread declines in insect biomass and diversity are increasing concerns within the s... more Although widespread declines in insect biomass and diversity are increasing concerns within the scientific community, it remains unclear whether attention to pollinator declines has also increased within information sources serving the general public. Examining patterns of journalistic attention to the pollinator population crisis can also inform efforts to raise awareness about the importance of declines of insect species providing ecosystem services beyond pollination. We used the Global News Index developed by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign to track news attention to pollinator topics in nearly 25 million news items published by two American national newspapers and four international wire services over the past four decades. We found vanishingly low levels of attention to pollinator population topics relative to coverage of climate change, which we use as a comparison topic. In the most recent subset of ∼10 million ...
Codebook and Dataset by Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, 2019
The Cline Center Historical Phoenix Event Data covers the period 1945-2018 and includes several m... more The Cline Center Historical Phoenix Event Data covers the period 1945-2018 and includes several million events extracted from 17.5 million news stories. This data was produced using the state-of-the-art PETRARCH-2 software to analyze content from the New York Times (1945-2019), the BBC Monitoring's Summary of World Broadcasts (1979-2015) and the Central Intelligence Agency’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (1995-2004). It documents the agents, locations, and issues at stake in a wide variety of conflict, cooperation and communicative events in the CAMEO ontology. The Cline Center produced this data with the generous support of Linowes Fellow and Faculty Affiliate Prof. Dov Cohen and help from our academic and private sector collaborators in the Open Event Data Alliance (OEDA).
Pressured by skyrocketing demand, Chinese oil companies have branched out across the globe seekin... more Pressured by skyrocketing demand, Chinese oil companies have branched out across the globe seeking new oil supplies to feed the country’s economic growth. By 2006, China had made oil investments in almost every part of the world, including Africa. These initiatives have not been without controversy. From the commercial perspective, Western companies complain that China’s ability to link its oil investments to government-to-government financial assistance gives its companies an unfair advantage. From the political perspective, Western nongovernmental organizations have accused China of using its investments to support some of the more abusive, corrupt, and violent governments in the world. The poster child for this argument has been China’s support for the Sudanese government and its unwillingness to condemn publicly the genocidal practices of the janjaweed militias operating in Darfur. China’s repeated contention that it does not get involved in domestic politics and that its relationships with African governments is strictly commercial is perceived by many as hollow. Critics argue that without China’s investments and tacit support, African governments, such as the Sudan’s, would be forced to amend their behavior. This chapter looks at the validity of these arguments and how they are manifested on the African continent. It focuses on China’s activities in the Sudan and Angola, not only because they are the largest measured, both in terms of dollar value and scope, but because they incorporate features that characterize Chinese efforts to secure incremental oil supplies from African countries.
The outcome of ongoing debates over the future of American military strategy will play a critical... more The outcome of ongoing debates over the future of American military strategy will play a critical role in shaping the foreign and military policies of the United States over the next decade. Traditionalists worry about the shift towards emphasizing counterinsurgency (COIN) operations and irregular warfare, believing that the use of force is often ineffective in COIN situations and the American military should concentrate on planning for conventional war. In contrast, COIN advocates argue that the United States must focus its efforts on preparing for the wars it is most likely to fight, irregular wars. However, both schools of thought rely on assumptions about the future security environment that may reveal another path forward. First, although it seems intuitive to view irregular warfare as the dominant future concern, it is exceedingly difficult to predict accurately the future security environment, as the last 20 years have clearly shown. Second, and perhaps most importantly, the character of emergent threats will depend on how the United States focuses its resources. Paradoxically, no matter what it emphasizes, the military threats the United States is or will be most capable of defeating are the ones it is least likely to face, since potential adversaries will be deterred and seek other ways of confrontation. However, with some smart and careful investments, including the recognition that not all parts of the military have to be optimized for the same task, the United States military can both lock in its conventional dominance and continue to improve its ability to succeed in the irregular wars most likely to dominate the landscape in the short to medium term.
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Papers by Dan Shalmon