The Dynamics of Collective Action Corpus

This respository includes two datasets, a Document-Term Matrix and associated metadata, for 17,493 New York Times articles covering protest events, both saved as single R objects.

These datasets are based on the original Dynamics of Collective Action (DoCA) dataset  (Wang and Soule 2012; Earl, Soule, and McCarthy). The original DoCA datset contains variables for protest events referenced in roughly 19,676 New York Times articles reporting on collective action events occurring in the US between 1960 and 1995. Data were collected as part of the Dynamics of Collective Action Project at Stanford University. Research assistants read every page of all daily issues of the New York Times to find descriptions of 23,624 distinct protest events. The text for the news articles were not included in the original DoCA data.

We attempted to recollect the raw text in a semi-supervised fashion by matching article titles to create the Dynamics of Collective Action Corpus. In addition to hand-checking random samples and hand-collecting some articles (specifically, in the case of false positives), we also used some automated matching processes to ensure the recollected article titles matched their respective titles in the DoCA dataset. The final number of recollected and matched articles is 17,493.

We then subset the original DoCA dataset to include only rows that match a recollected article. The "20231006_dca_metadata_subset.Rdata" contains all of the metadata variables from the original DoCA dataset (see Codebook), with the addition of "pdf_file" (used to link to original article pdfs) and "pub_title" (which is the title of the recollected article and may differ from the "title" variable in the original dataset), for a total of 106 variables and 21,126 rows (noting that a row is a distinct protest events and one article may cover more than one protest event).

Once collected, we prepared these texts using typical preprocessing procedures (and some less typical procedures, which were necessary given that these were OCRed texts). We followed these steps in this order: We removed headers and footers that were consistent across all digitized stories and any web links or HTML; added a single space before an uppercase letter when it was flush against a lowercase letter to its right (e.g., turning "JohnKennedy'' into "John Kennedy''); removed excess whitespace; converted all characters to the broadest range of Latin characters and then transliterated to "Basic Latin'' ASCII characters; replaced curly quotes with their ASCII counterparts; replaced contractions (e.g., turned "it's'' into "it is''); removed punctuation; removed capitalization; removed numbers; fixed word kerning; applied a final extra round of whitespace removal.

We then tokenized them by following the rule that each word is a character string surrounded by a single space. At this step, each document is then a list of tokens. We count each unique token to create a document-term matrix (DTM), where each row is an article, each column is a unique token (occurring at least once in the corpus as a whole), and each cell is the number of times each token occurred in each article. Finally, we removed words (i.e., columns in the DTM) that occurred less than four times in the corpus as a whole or were only a single character in length (likely orphaned characters from the OCRing process). The final DTM has 66,552 unique words, 10,134,304 total tokens and 17,493 documents. The "20231006_dca_dtm.Rdata" is a sparse matrix class object from the Matrix R package.

In R, use the load() function to load the objects `dca_dtm` and `dca_meta`. To associate the `dca_meta` to the `dca_dtm` , match the "pdf_file" variable in`dca_meta` to the rownames of `dca_dtm`.