Cline Center News and Announcements

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

2020 Schroeder Fellows

Apr 24, 2020 12:15 pm

The Cline Center is pleased to announce that Political Science doctoral students HyunJoo Cho, Tolgahan Dilgin, and Kristin Bail will be joining us as 2020 Schroeder Fellows this summer.

HyunJoo will be using the Cline Center’s Global News Index and Historical Phoenix Event data to extract news sources for analysis to explore whether political leaders treat territorial issues systematically differently from non-territorial issues in order to increase political legitimacy and popular support.

Tolgahan will be using the Cline Center’s Global News Index and SPEED Civil Unrest Data to determine whether political parties tend to target strongholds for pre-election violence with the goal of maximizing their chances for winning elections.

Kristin will be using the Cline Center’s Global News Index and SPEED Civil Unrest Data to broadly investigate which features of a country’s political environment shape what people know about politics and what factors most affect the contours of international news flows.

For more info about the Schroeder Graduate Fellows program, please visit: http://www.clinecenter.illinois.edu/about/groups/schroeder/

Cline Center partners with Global Registry of Violent Deaths (GReVD)

Mar 25, 2020 12:15 pm

We are excited to announce the launch of the Global Registry of Violent Deaths (GReVD) website. The site is a public-facing portal for a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary consortium working to accurately measure the scale of lethal violence worldwide. We hope that the data and tools provided by GReVD will enable citizen-scientists and governments to annually benchmark progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of promoting peace and justice by significantly reducing “all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere.” To learn more visit www.grevd.com

2020 Linowes Lecture Canceled

Mar 18, 2020 10:15 am

Regretfully, we must cancel the 2020 Linowes Lecture. Given the risks posed by the novel coronavirus, units across the University of Illinois system are canceling public events, and the Cline Center is no exception.

We plan to return to our usual schedule of public events once the public health emergency has abated.

You can learn more about the Linowes Lectures and watch past events on our website: https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/news-and-events/events/linowes-lectures

Thanking Lori Montana for her Support

Jan 6, 2020 12:00 pm

We would like to thank Lori Montana (BA ’79) for her support of the Cline Center. Her generosity helped to fund the initial development of Archer, software that enables researchers to easily search the Center’s Global News Index. Previously, the Index was accessible to only a handful of Cline Center Affiliates with significant programming skills.

The prototype Archer system makes it easier to produce data for research applications, and to communicate insights for difference-makers in the scientific, business, non-profit and public sectors derived from more than 150 million news stories indexed by the Cline Center.

To learn more about more about Lori’s gift and the work it supported, see this press release from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS): https://las.illinois.edu/news/2019-12-11/transforming-data-knowledge

If you are interested in supporting the Cline Center, please visit: https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/donate.

Updated Historical Phoenix Event Data Available

Dec 9, 2019 3:00 pm

Cline Center faculty and staff are very pleased to announce the publication of updated Historical Phoenix Event Data. These were generated using state-of-the-art PETRARCH-2 software to process news articles into event data that document the participants, locations, and issues at stake in political conflict and cooperation processes.

This release extends the data extracted from the BBC Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB) into 2019. It also adds a “civil conflict” indicator variable for the SWB-based data generated by a machine learning-based classifier that predicts whether an article is relevant to civil unrest and conflict.

The December 2019 release also includes previously-released events generated from the New York Times (1945-2018), and the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (1995-2004). The Times-based data has been revised to correct some erroneous dates. In addition to event data, we provide document-level metadata for the SWB corpus and the most recent version of the New York Times-based data (1980-2018).

A Cline Center 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://doi.org/10.13012/B2IDB-0647142_V2