Subject-specific conferences

The 2018 Collaborative Research on Extreme-Scale Text Analytics (CRESTA) workshop was held on February 1-4, 2018, on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. The theme for this workshop was “Text Analytics Applications for Monitoring and Understand Contentious Processes.” There was focus on a diverse array of large-scale text analytic methods that can help us better understand processes that run the gamut of contention from nonviolent protest to hybrid warfare, including novel geo-parsing methods to topic models, narrative analysis, and event extraction. Data developed at the Cline Center were displayed as well.  The ultimate goal of the workshop was to lay the groundwork for publishable, financially-viable and innovative social science research through dialogue and collaborative data generation. 

The conference on “Measuring Inter-group Differences in  Socio-cultural Groups” was part of the second phase of the Cline Center’s Composition of Religious and Ethnic Groups (CREG) project which is devoted to developing and executing a survey that captures data on key differences between the socio-cultural groups for which population data had been collected. The objective of the conference was to generate informed feedback on a preliminary draft for the CREG survey. To learn more about this conference please use the link above.

To provide feedback on interim results generated by a grant the Cline Center and the U. S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL) jointly hosted a conference entitled "Proactive Peace Building with Natural Resources Assets: Analysis of Historical Controversies and Conflicts to Inform Future Actions" It was held at the University Club of Chicago on August 18-19, 2010. In addition to providing interim results on the research, which involved evaluating a number of peace building initiatives using the SPEED project, information was exchanged on a number of on-going projects.

This conference was held to introduce the Cline Center's signature research initiative, the Societal Infrastructures and Development Project (SID) to a selected group of research scholars, government officials, and representatives from non-governmental organizations. The conference was held at the University Club of Chicago on April 24th and 25th 2008. The objective of the conference was to generate feedback by knowledgeable individuals about the SID project at an early stage of its development. Participants were provided with background materials on SID before the conference, which was funded by a generous grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

This conference on the 2006 midterm elections was held to assess the factors underlying the historical change in party control that occurred in both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate. The conference was sponsored by the Cline Center, and it was organized by Professor Jeffery Mondak, the Benson Professor of Political Science, and Dona-Gene Mitchell, and held at the Urbana-Champaign campus on October 18th and 19th, 2007. Anticipating the importance of the 2006 election, the Cline Center co-sponsored a unique national survey of voters, with citizens contacted both before and after Election Day. The survey, cosponsored by the Center on Congress at Indiana University, which was headed by former Representative Lee Hamilton, included an over-sample of voters living in competitive U.S. House districts, thus allowing researchers to gain unprecedented insight on the impact of media effects, campaign advertising and partisan mobilization efforts.

The collection of reports from this conference were published in a volume edited by Jeffery Mondak and Dona-Gene-Mitchell called Fault Lines: Why the Republicans Lost Congress (Controversies in Electoral Democracy and Representation).

This conference was held to commemorate the centennial of the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the creation of the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research. It was held at the Urbana-Champaign campus between October 24 and October 27, 2004. In preparation for this conference a set of original essays were commissioned that focused on the challenges, and opportunities, facing democracy in the 21st century.