Responsible Terrorism Coverage (ResTeCo)

The Responsible Terrorism Coverage (or ResTeCo) Project is a collaborative project which aims to address a fundamental dilemma facing 21st century societies: journalists struggling 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. 

Funding for this project is available through a Trans-Atlantic Platform Digging Into Data (DiD) Challenge grant.  The Cline Center's 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 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

To see the data and code that this project has produced, see:  https://responsibleterrorismcoverage.org/data-code/