The Cline Center is pleased to announce the release of our Historical Phoenix Event Data. Parsing nearly 14 million news stories, we documented the agents, locations, and issues at stake in around 5 million conflict, cooperation, and communicative events from all around the world between 1945 and 2015 using the CAMEO ontology. This is the first state-of-the-art open-access political event dataset to cover 70 years of history, and it is useful for researching topics ranging from trade to civil and international conflict processes, peace-making, predicting asset values, and political forecasting.
With the help of academic and private-sector collaborators in the Open Event Data Alliance (OEDA), and with generous support from Linowes Fellow Prof. Dov Cohen, we used PETRARCH-2 software to process stories from the New York Times (1945-2005) as well as translated media from BBC Monitoring’s Summary of World Broadcasts (1979-2015) and the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (1995-2004).
This data describes the behavior of hundreds of agents — including governments, businesses, political factions, international organizations and ordinary citizens — and identifies dozens of event types ranging from threats and promises to protests, riots, and violent attacks.
We plan to update and enhance these data, and we are working on a paper to more formally introduce the dataset. In addition, we’re processing additional sources for the 1945-2015 period, and are developing new improvements to provide richer and more accurate geolocation, issue, and event categorization.
The dataset is accessible via our website, along with a variable description document: http://www.clinecenter.illinois.edu/data/event/phoenix/
If you have any questions or comments, please contact us at: cline-center@illinois.edu