Activities & Achievements

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Activities & Achievements

Transforming information into knowledge
that advances human flourishing.

Explore how the Cline Center and its affiliates are pursuing our shared vision through research, education, collaboration, and outreach.

Demarcating Episodes of Civil Strife: An Inductive, Iterative Approach

This document outlines the procedures and criteria used to delineate episodes of civil strife for 164 countries in the world for the period from January 1, 1946 to December 31, 2005. Prior research has been handicapped by a lack of data on civil strife events and defensible criteria for…

Climate Change and Civil Unrest: The Impact of Rapid-onset Disasters

This article examines the destabilizing impact of rapid-onset, climate-related disasters. It uses a sample of storms and floods in conjunction with two intensity measures of civil unrest to examine two perspectives on human reactions to disasters (conflictual, cooperative). It also uses insights…

The Coup D'Etat Project (CDP) White Paper

Coup d'états are important events in the life of a country. They constitute an important subset of irregular transfers of political power that can have important and enduring consequences for a country’s well-being. This notwithstanding, a comprehensive and well-documented inventory of coups has…

Media Data and Social Science Research: Problems and Approaches

News media provide a unique source of information on important societal developments, both contemporary and historical. Consequently, over the past forty years, social scientists have attempted to utilize media data to study important questions in a number of fields. But these efforts have been…

Conceptualizing and Measuring Rule of Law Constructs

This article outlines an effort to gauge cross-national and inter-temporal differences in law-based orders for 165 nations from 1850 to 2010. Despite the increasing importance attributed to “the rule of law,” there have been few efforts to develop objective measures of it. The conceptual…

The SPEED Project's Societal Stability Protocol: An Overview

This document provides an introduction to, and an overview of, the SPEED Project's Societal Stability Protocol (SSP).  The SSP's aim is to generate event data that will advance our understanding of civil unrest in the post-WWII era.  The SSP's focus is on human-initiated destabilizing…

Collaborative Research on Extreme-Scale Text Analytics (CRESTA) Workshop

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

Representation of Race and Gender in News-Gazette Crime Coverage

This study set out to analyze demographic characteristics of criminal suspects included in crime reporting published by the Champaign (Illinois) News-Gazette newspaper, and to compare the demographics of suspects in the news to the demographics of suspects arrested or jailed in Champaign County…

SPEED's Societal Stability Protocol and the Study of Civil Unrest: An Overview and Comparison with Other Event Data Projects

SPEED is a technology-intensive effort to collect a comprehensive body of global event data for the Post WWII era. It is a protocol-driven system that was designed to provide insights into key behavioral patterns and relationships that are valid across countries and over time. SPEED's Societal…

Gauging Cross-national Differences in Educational Attainment: A 60 Year Look at Global Educational Trends

Educational attainment is both a driver of developmental processes and a key indicator of human development. Yet cross-national data on educational attainment for the post WWII era is spotty, despite significant efforts by the UN and several highly respected academic teams to compile it.…

Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People

Since so few people appear knowledgeable about public affairs, one might question whether collective policy preferences revealed in opinion surveys accurately convey the distribution of voices and interests in a society. Scott Althaus' comprehensive analysis of the relationship between knowledge…

Transforming Textual Information on Events into Event Data within SPEED

Creating a valid and reliable body of event data requires meeting a number of challenges (clearly defining the events to be studied, developing reliable sources of information on those events, identifying source documents with relevant information, etc.). The fact that most event data projects,…

The Societal Infrastructures and Development Project (SID): Gauging Differences in Institutional Designs

This PowerPoint presentation was presented at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association on September 3-6, 2009. It provides an overview of research on national institutions, societal contexts and societal welfare, broadly defined.

Popular Efficacy in the Democratic Era: A Reexamination of Electoral Accountability in the United States, 1828-2000

Social scientists have long criticized American voters for being "unsophisticated" in the way they acquire and use political information. The low level of political sophistication leaves them vulnerable to manipulation by political "elites," whose sway over voters is deemed incontrovertible and…

Automatic Document Categorization for Highly Nuanced Topics in Massive-Scale Document Collections: The SPEED BIN Program

This whitepaper offers a brief introduction to the BIN system of the Social, Political and Economic Event Database (SPEED) project. BIN provides automatic document categorization of highly nuanced topics across massive-scale document archives. The BIN system allows a group of trained human…