blog posts

• Professor Althaus Discusses American News Coverage of the Vietnam War

  Sep 5, 2017 5:15 pm

  Today the Illinois News Bureau published an interview with Cline Center Director Professor Scott Althaus about our work on the ways media coverage can affect American politics.

  His ongoing research finds that media coverage had a minimal effect on the public’s view of the Vietnam War. This finding weakens the basis for a factual claim about ‘casualty sensitivity’ that has had a profound impact on public dialogue about war, as well as debates within the US government and national security establishment for more than 40 years. 

• Announcing 2017-2018 Linowes Fellows

  Aug 21, 2017 8:00 am

  Professors Avital Livny and Stephen Chaudoin of the Department of Political Science have been selected as our 2017-2018 Linowes Fellows. These two outstanding scholars were selected from a very competitive field to work at the Cline Center with our data, research staff, and interns.

   Professor Livny will continue work on the Composition of Religious and Ethnic Groups (CREG) project. Her team is integrating dozens of censuses and thousands of surveys into a high-quality dynamic global dataset of religious and ethnic populations. Her work will also enrich with existing datasets on the political and socio-economic status of these groups.

   Professor Chaudoin will be using our Global News Archive and text-analytic technologies from our event data projects to analyze the dynamics of international law in nearly real time. His initial effort will focus on actors contending over the Filipino ‘war on drugs.’ Ultimately, he aims to develop real-time ‘seismographs’ that track events, media coverage, and citizen reactions related to international law and human rights.

   Linowes Fellows are supported by the generosity of Prof. David F. Linowes (1917-2007) and his family.

   

• Cline Center Historical Phoenix Data

  Jul 3, 2017 8:00 am

  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

• Three Cline Center Alumni have Received Prestigious Fulbright and Boren Scholarships.

  Jun 22, 2017 8:00 am

  We’re very proud to announce that three Cline Center alumni have received prestigious Fulbright and Boren Scholarships.

  Two of the 14 Illini who received Fulbrights this year worked at the Cline Center: Britney Nadler was a Nerad Student Researcher working on the SPEED civil unrest monitoring program. Alexandra Turcios was a Social Science Intern working on our Coup d’etat Project. Derek Hoot was the only U of I student to receive a Boren Scholarship this year, and served as a Nerad Student Researcher.

  The US government’s flagship educational exchange program, Fulbright Student awards recognize academic and professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential. Boren Scholarships provide funding for exceptional U.S. students who study languages in world regions critical to U.S. interests. After graduation, Boren recipients work for the US Government for at least one year.

  All three students were James Scholars. Ms. Nadler and Ms. Turcios will work as teachers in Thailand and Indonesia respectively. Mr. Hoot will be studying in Jordan.

  The Illinois News Bureau has more information about the Fulbright recipients and you can read about Mr. Hoot’s scholarship here. Students interested following in their footsteps and joining the Cline Center should email: cline-center@illinois.edu

• Boeschenstein Seminar on Public Policy: Building a Comprehensive Database of Police Shootings

  May 25, 2017 9:00 am

  The Cline Center recently organized the 2017 Boeschenstein Seminar on Public Policy which featured more than 20 academics, community advocates, researchers and law enforcement officers from around the country.  

  They joined us to discuss the need for a Cline Center-built comprehensive database of police shootings and their aftermath. This diverse and capable group came together to help create data that enables citizens, scholars and law enforcement agencies to develop a better understanding of police shootings, community responses and paths towards a safer and more peaceful future.

  A video about the seminar is here: goo.gl/n3X1SR

  We also want to extend heartfelt thanks to our distinguished guests and new friends from International Association of Chiefs of Police, Fatal Encounters.org, the NAACP, the ACLU of Illinois, the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), the Invisible Institute, the Dixon, Illinois Police Department, Charleston, Illinois Police Department, Streetcred Software, Inc, the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, the Center for Law & Human Behavior at UT El Paso, and the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Louisville.

• Cline Center Awarded "Digging Into Data" Challenge Grant

  Mar 29, 2017 8:00 am

  The Cline Center is excited to announce that we have been awarded a Trans-Atlantic Platform Digging Into Data (DiD) Challenge grant.  The American portion of our work will be funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and European organizations will be supporting our partners at the Free University of Amsterdam and Mannheim University.

  Our project is called Responsible Terrorism Coverage (or ResTeCo), and aims to address a fundamental dilemma facing 21^st century societies: journalists struggle to give citizens the information they need without giving terrorists the kind of attention they want. Defined as ‘propaganda of the deed,’ terrorism involves spectacular acts that enable small numbers of radicals to affect millions of lives by sowing intense fear and hatred. Although they seek widespread publicity, terrorists also target journalists—precisely because they fear a responsible, free media and a well-informed public.

  ResTeCo aims to inform best practices by using extreme-scale text analytic methods to extract knowledge from more than 70 years of terrorism-related media coverage from all around the world and in 5 languages. It will dramatically expand the available data on the way media ecologies respond to terrorism, and enable us to develop empirically-validated models for socially responsible and effective news organizations. 

  The Transatlantic Platform’s announcement is here, and you can download a more detailed list of the 14 winning Digging into Data Challenge projects here. To learn more about the DiD program, see: https://diggingintodata.org/about

  And to find out more about the US-based projects supported by NEH, see: https://www.neh.gov/news/press-release/March2017Grants

• Celebrating Professor David F. Linowes

  Mar 16, 2017 8:00 am

  Today we celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the birth of Professor David F. Linowes (1917-2007), who was an invaluable contributor to the Cline Center, a distinguished alumnus (Honors, ’41), and inspiring public intellectual.

  In addition to serving as the Boeschenstein Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and as Professor of Business Administration in the College of Business, Professor Linowes was a highly-successful accountant and a dedicated public servant under Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

  Best known for leading a highly-influential post-Watergate commission on the future of privacy law, he also led three other presidential commissions and State Department and UN missions to countries in South America and Asia to disseminate best practices for privatization programs. A veteran of WWII, he authored more than a dozen books and was known as the “father of socio-economic accounting” — a method of incorporating social and environmental impacts into decision-making. 

  Thanks to the generosity of the Linowes family, this legacy of service and scholarship lives on at the U of I. Since 2012, Linowes Faculty Fellows at the Cline Center have pursued projects that bring cutting-edge methods and data to bear on pressing social and political problems. They also select a distinguished speaker for the annual Linowes Lecture on Public Policy and Management.

  This year’s talk, scheduled for April 26^th, will tackle analytical problems similar to the ones that Prof. Linowes studied. Professor Scott E. Page, Hurwicz Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics at the University of Michigan, will describe novel ways to inform cost-benefit analysis using ensembles of many quantitative models simultaneously. Integrating ideas from physics, computer science, economics and statistics, Professor Page’s proposed method echoes Linowes’ own interdisciplinary approach to policymaking by—in the words of David Linowes—taking “into account more points of view than would normally be considered” and enabling “all relevant sources of expertise, and all affected interests to be brought together for sustained, focused, and creative analysis of issues.”

  The public is welcome to attend, and a livestream video will be available on our Facebook page — just ‘like’ us and stay tuned. To learn more about the Linowes Lectures or watch them online, see: http://www.clinecenter.illinois.edu/news/events/linoweslectures/

   And to learn more about Professor Linowes’ life and legacy, check out today’s commemorative announcement from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

  

• Prof. Jay Rosen: Winter is Coming - The Trump Regime & the American Press

  Mar 1, 2017 8:00 am

  Award-winning journalism scholar Prof. Jay Rosen of NYU will be presenting "Winter is Coming: The Trump Regime and the American Press" on March 8th at Lincoln Hall 1092.  This event is being co-sponsored by the Cline Center and organized by the Unit for Criticism as part of its Theory in Critical Times lecture series. More information is  available on their website here:https://criticism.english.illinois.edu/winter-coming-trump-regime-american-press-jay-rosen-new-york-u

• 2017 Schroeder Summer Graduate Fellows

  Mar 1, 2017 8:00 am

  The Cline Center is seeking U of I graduate students in political science to join our team as 2017 Schroeder Summer Graduate Fellows.  Supported by a generous gift from William A. and the late Paul W. Schroeder, the Schroeder Fellowships support rigorous research on topics related to the Cline Center’s research agenda. It provides a stipend, office space, and access to data. Please help us get the word out.

  To learn more or to apply, see the Schroeder program page, or email us at: cline-center@illinois.edu

• Announcing the 2017 Cline Symposium Guest Speaker: Eliot Cohen

  Feb 17, 2017 8:00 am

  SAVE THE DATE:  Prof. Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins will deliver the keynote at the 2017 Cline Symposium on November 9^th, 2017. As Director of the Strategic Studies Program at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Prof. Cohen is eminently qualified to address our theme: “American Grand Strategy and the Changing Global Order.”

   An award-winning SAIS professor since 1990, he is also US Army veteran, and has served in senior advisory roles at the State Department, the Department of Defense, as well as the National Security Advisory Panel of the National Intelligence Council.

   To get event details and updates as soon as possible, ‘like’ the Cline Center on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter @CCD_Illinois

   Interested friends can find Prof. Cohen’s regular column in the American Interest here: http://bit.ly/1MPUINn or follow him on Twitter @EliotACohen. You can read a review of his recent book, “The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force,” in the Washington Post.