What's New at the Penn State Event Data Project Website?

NOTE: This doesn't actually get updated all that often, so it isn't so much "What's New" as "What's interesting." But occasionally we will actually be posting some notes about what is new...

  • "Seven Deadly of Quantitative Political Analysis": yes, brain-washed masses indoctrinated by the frequentist social science numeroacracy: everything you know is wrong! Read the paper, by an "old fart who in any reasonably prudent traditional culture would have long ago been strapped into a leaking canoe and sent out with the tide" that is inspiring 20-somethings, and pissing off Boomers, across the country! [Okay, okay, it's not that big a deal, but it was a top download from the 2010 APSA meeting and I just realized it wasn't on this site anywhere]

  • CountryInfo.txt is a general purpose file intended to facilitate natural language processing of news reports and political texts.. Fields include synoymns for the country name, various codes (COW, ISI, FIPS-10), capital and major cities, and government leaders for 240 countries and administrative regions. .actors dictionary derived from this is also available, along with some utility programs.

  • "events" package for R "Stores, manipulates, aggregates and otherwise messes with event data from KEDS/TABARI or any other extraction tool with similar output." Maintainer is Will Lowe (will.lowe@uni-mannheim.de). Available at the CRAN R repository. For most people, this will be far more useful than the much older KEDS-Count.

  • Click here for the latest version of the Levant data sets: these are now current to November 2011 and recently underwent a thoroughly cleaning to deal with out-of-sequence files, bad codes and the like. Also the AFP sequence has been completely revised, using Reuters to fill in gaps in the texts available from Lexis-Nexis

  • Click here to go to a detailed history of the KEDS project written for the Summer 2006 issue of The Political Methodologist

  • A coder's guide to coding: Former KEDS Research Assistant Joseph Pull writes about the problems coders face when using TABARI, and how best to remedy them in his Ode to Coding.

  • TABARI -- the open-source, C-language, Linux OS, Penn State Event Data Project-compatible parser-coder. Version 0.7 is now available for the Macintosh OS-X and Linux operating systems, with a less elegant but working version available for Windows as well.

  • CAMEO Codebooks. CAMEO is our new system for coding events relevant to international mediations. A codebook is available in HTML and pdf format; CAMEO-coded data sets and dictionaries are on the web site, and our 2002 International Studies Association paper compares the CAMEO and WEIS coding frameworks. Version 0.10b2 (July 2011) includes the CAMEORC religious group coding framework for approximately 1,500 religions, as well as considerable editorial changes in the actor coding ontology.

  • Slides from Workshop on Automated Coding of Event Data
    University of Kentucky, November 2011
  • Slides from Workshop on Automated Content Analysis
    2003 Summer Conference on Political Methodology (University of Minnesota)
    Click here to go to an HTML version of the slides presented at the workshop.

  • Paper: "A New Kind of Social Science: The Path Beyond Current (IR) Methodologies May Lie Beneath Them" (ISA 2004, Montreal) Pattern recognition and visualization methods inspired by Stephen Wolfram, applied to event data. Includes link to a web site where you can experiment with the methods and data.

  • Analyzing International Event Data: A Handbook of Computer-Based Techniques -- this is a book-length guide to event data coding and analysis, based on the work at the Kansas Event Data Project in the 1990s. A draft of the full manuscript is now available.

  • Additional event data sets:
    Levant, through June 2004 (WEIS coding, rather than CAMEO)
    former Yugoslavia, through July 2003 (WEIS)
    West Africa, through February 2002
    Pevehouse-Goldstein International Cooperation & Regional Conflicts event data sets for Bosnia, China, Cuba, Haiti, India, Levant, Somalia (1987-1997)

  • Download TestRandomizer program [C program for generating multiple choice exams -- Mac and Linux]

LAST UPDATED: 16 DECEMBER 2011