8400 Baltimore Ave., Suite 250, College Park, MD 20740
On Wednesday, May 4, 2016, team members from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Interdisciplinary Research INSPIRE project will give a Computational Social Science and Conflict Workshop titled Merging Events by Location, Time and Type (MELTT): Application to Conflict Event Data.
The recent emergence of subnationally disaggregated datasets with spatio-temporal dimensions, including several of date-specific, georeferenced conflict events, offers prospects for conducting novel analyses. To date, researchers conducting analyses that use these datasets have tended to rely on just one of them at a time. This approach ignores the potential value of the information contained in the multiple available datasets, which could provide more comprehensive, precise, and valid measurement of conflict phenomena. Only limited efforts have been made to use multiple conflict datasets to validate coding accuracy and refine measurement, or to conduct more complex analyses that span different types of conflict events. Integration of conflict datasets presents challenges. A key consideration is that they overlap in terms of the event types they cover, but the data differ even for identical types of events, due to dissimilarities in the collection and coding of source information. We propose, implement and systematically test an original automated discrimination procedure to integrate geo-coded event datasets, with disambiguation of entries. We illustrate the need for the procedure with reference to the example of Nigeria during 2011 and demonstrate the implementation of the procedure using the UCDP-GED, ACLED, SCAD, and GTD datasets. Our work highlights shortcomings inherent in utilizing a single conflict event dataset and the evident benefits of dataset integration.
Presenters Include:
Karsten Donnay, ETH-Zurich & Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland
Eric Dunford, Government and Politics, University of Maryland
Erin McGrath, START
David Backer, Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland
David Cunningham, Government and Politics, University of Maryland