Sustaining Modern Infrastructure For Political And Social Event Data

The main goal of this project is to integrate and expand our end-to-end cyberinfrastructure for robust creation, validation, access, and analysis of political event data. Event data in this context refers to a machine-coded description of someone doing something to someone else as extracted from news reports. We focus on political and social events about conflict and cooperation between governments, individuals, non-governmental organizations, rebel groups, and others. We rely on natural language processing tools to code event data by annotating the kinds of political events that are of interest to political scientists, international relations scholars, sociologists, and the national security community. Our system scrapes contemporaneous news reports in English, Spanish, and other languages, and automatically encodes relevant political events for data analysts. Our data, along with other open event data, are available through our API and R interface at eventdata.utdallas.edu.