blog posts

• Employee Spotlight: Meet Ajay Singh

  Aug 17, 2023 3:30 pm

  EMPLOYEE SPOTLIGHT: Meet Ajay Singh. 

  Dr. Singh has been a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Cline Center since summer of 2022 and has been affiliated with the Cline Center since 2008. Dr. Singh received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Illinois in 2022. His dissertation examines the impacts of information and communication technology implementation on small and mid-sized policing agencies, and how both social activists and law enforcement conceptualize and practice understandings of transparency and accountability in policing. His current research focuses on documenting uses of lethal force by law enforcement. 

  Dr. Singh is the coordinator for the Cline Center’s External Engagement Team and is on the leadership team for the Cline Center’s SPOTLITE project where he leads many of the project’s qualitative research efforts.

• Cline Center Honored with the 2023 Team Award for Campus Excellence in Public Engagement

  Jun 1, 2023 1:00 pm

  
  

  The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research has been honored with a 2023 Campus Excellence in Public Engagement Faculty & Staff Team Award by the University of Illinois. Recognizing the Cline Center’s sustained record of high-impact public engagement research, this is a shared honor for all research team members who have contributed over the years to the center’s many projects that aim to transform information into knowledge that advances human flourishing.

  For more details about the award, see: https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/801396025

• Remembering Dick Cline

  Mar 22, 2023 10:15 am

  It is with great sadness that we share the news of Dick Cline’s passing on March 19, 2023. To those of us at the Cline Center, he was far more than the generous benefactor whose founding endowment gave life to the Cline Center nearly two decades ago. Dick was also a dear friend and mentor to many of us, who will greatly miss his incisive wisdom, constant encouragement, and easy laughter. All of us will remember Dick as an involved and enthusiastic champion of the Cline Center’s mission to transform information into knowledge that advances human flourishing around the world. We are honored to now serve as a living legacy of Dick’s vision for bringing academic research to bear on the most pressing societal problems of our day.

  For those interested in learning more about the vision that led Dick Cline to launch the Cline Center, we are honored to share this collection of Dick’s reflections on “the freedom that enables free will, the institutions that encourage freedom, and the benefits that flow from giving human will the maximum opportunity for free expression” published in 2007 as Echoes of Freedom: Personal Reflections of Richard C. Cline.

• SPOTLITE: New Database Catalogs Use of Lethal Force Incidents

  Oct 7, 2022 11:00 am

  The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research in partnership with an interdisciplinary team of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty and student researchers has just released the most authoritative registry to date of police uses of lethal force in Illinois from 2014 to 2021. The Systematic Policing Oversight Through Lethal-force Incident Tracking Environment (SPOTLITE) includes any incident where police use firearms—including those with non-fatal outcomes—as well as any other use of force that results in a death. The SPOTLITE Illinois dashboard lets anyone explore past uses of lethal force by police in every Illinois county, and assess the racial and ethnic breakdown of civilians involved in these incidents. For more background on the project, visit https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/1985101181

• The Cline Center is Hosting "The Race to Find America's Missing in Action Using 21st-Century Technologies"

  Feb 14, 2022 10:30 am

  The Cline Center is hosting Project Recover’s Pat Scannon and Derek Abbey for a March 2 screening of the Project Recover documentary “To What Remains” and a post-film discussion about the race to find America’s missing in action from past wars using advanced robotics and scanning technologies before the window to bring them home closes. This event is free to the public and will be both in-person and live-streamed.

• Announcing the 2021-2022 Linowes Fellows

  Aug 4, 2021 11:15 am

  The Cline Center is pleased to announce the 2021-2022 David F. Linowes Faculty Fellows: Assistant Professors Jodi Schneider and Peter Christensen of the School of Information Sciences and the Agriculture & Consumer Economics respectively.

  Linowes Fellowships support scholars whose work is relevant to Cline Center initiatives and plan to use Cline Center data and technology in innovative projects.

  Prof. Schneider is extending her 2020-21 project by continuing to investigate whether the news on public health emergencies is polarized along party lines, and to what extent. To do so, she plans to use the Cline Center’s Global News Index (GNI) and Archer system to investigate U.S. news on the opioid crisis (2004-2016) and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-). 

  Prof. Christensen’s project is designed to reveal the causal linkages between local protest activity, local media coverage, and the incidence of discrimination in the housing market. A significant challenge in studying these relationships involves the absence of information that can be used to characterize the timing and character of local, contemporaneous protest movements.  To address this challenge, Prof. Christensen will integrate emerging Cline Center data on police shootings and community-level protests with experimental data on the incidence of racial discrimination in the 50 largest housing markets in the US.

  These projects reflect the values, goals, and standards set by Professor David F. Linowes during his long and distinguished service to the University of Illinois and the American people. Generous gifts from Professor Linowes and his family enable the Cline Center to support Faculty Fellows as well as the annual Linowes Lecture on Public Policy. These programs demonstrate our shared commitment to applying cutting-edge academic knowledge to today’s most challenging problems. More information about the Linowes Fellowship can be found here: https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/get-involved/LinowesFellows

• Media Coverage of Pollinator Decline

  Jan 13, 2021 9:15 am

  The world’s insect biomass is quietly declining by an average of 1-2% every year. Populations of pollinating insects vital to the world’s food supply are in crisis. Underscoring the looming “Insect Apocalypse,” a new Cline Center study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that declining populations of pollinating insects received little attention relative to climate change in U.S. news outlets, and hardly any attention in international wire services. 

  An interdisciplinary team consisting of Cline Center researchers and Professor May Berenbaum, the head of Entomology at the University of Illinois, used the Cline Center’s Global News Index to analyze nearly 25 million articles published by the New York Times, Washington Post, and four international wire services between 1977 and 2019. Of these millions of stories, less than a thousand mentioned pollinator population losses. 

  A more focused analysis of New York Times coverage revealed that although climate change stories now tend to be published in the front sections of the paper, stories mentioning pollinator populations tend to appear in less-visible sections. Since news agendas shape policy agendas, continued lack of journalistic attention will hinder efforts to protect these vital insects.

• Updated Cline Center Coup D’état Project Data Available

  Nov 18, 2020 3:15 pm

  The Cline Center Coup D’état Project team is very pleased to release a new dataset that documents 943 attempts to overthrow one or more of the branches of a national government in 136 countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.  These data describe the coup itself--who was involved, and whether they succeeded--as well as the fate of the targeted leaders.   The new data represents a substantial improvement over our previous release, and now covers the period 1945-2019. Over the last five years, a dedicated team of professional staff and students developed the software, data, and performed the fact-checking required to produce a comprehensive, accurate dataset.

  You can learn more about the project on our website, and you can access detailed documentation and the data itself at the Illinois Data Bank. 

• Announcing the 2020-2021 Linowes Fellows

  Jul 20, 2020 1:00 pm

  The Cline Center is pleased to announce the 2020-2021 David F. Linowes Faculty Fellows: Assistant Professors Alyssa Prorok and Jodi Schneider of the Department of Political Science and the School of Information Sciences at Illinois respectively.

  Linowes Fellowships support scholars whose work is relevant to Cline Center initiatives and plan to use Cline Center data and technology in innovative projects.

  Prof. Prorok’s is extending her 2019-2020 fellowship project which aims to use the Cline Center’s Global News Index and Phoenix data to collect information on cooperation between combatants engaged in civil war. The focus of her fellowship will be creating new data that can clarify the determinants and effects of cooperation between enemies.

  Prof. Schneider will investigate whether the news on public health emergencies is

  polarized along party lines, and to what extent. To do so, she plans to use the Cline Center’s Global News Index (GNI) and Archer system to investigate U.S. news on the opioid crisis (2004-2016) and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-)

  These projects reflect the values, goals, and standards set by Professor David F. Linowes during his long and distinguished service to the University of Illinois and the American people. Generous gifts from Professor Linowes and his family enable the Cline Center to support Faculty Fellows as well as the annual Linowes Lecture on Public Policy. These programs demonstrate our shared commitment to applying cutting-edge academic knowledge to today’s most challenging problems.

• Updated Cline Center Historical Phoenix Event Data: v.1.3.0

  May 20, 2020 11:00 am

  Cline Center faculty and staff are very pleased to announce the publication of new Historical Phoenix Event Data extracted from the Wall Street Journal (1945-2005). These data were generated using state-of-the-art PETRARCH-2 software to transform news articles into event records that document the participants, locations, and issues at stake in political conflict and cooperation processes.

  The new data includes a new “civil conflict” indicator generated by a machine learning algorithm that predicts whether an article is relevant to civil unrest and conflict. This release also includes article level metadata for the Wall Street Journal corpus.  

  A team of faculty, staff, student employees, and interns produced this dataset with the generous support of Faculty Affiliate Prof. Dov Cohen of the University of Illinois Psychology Department and with help from our partners at the Open Event Data Alliance (OEDA), including scholars at UT Dallas EPPS, Parus Analytics, and MIT.

  The data and documentation are available at the Illinois Data Bank: https://databank.illinois.edu/datasets/IDB-2796521

  To learn more about the Cline Center’s event data projects, please visit: https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/projects/research-themes/conflict-processes