Extracting information from global news reports in the post WWII era makes it possible to capitalize on the billions of dollars that have been invested in reporting on newsworthy events during that timeframe. It also offers unprecedented opportunities to improve our understanding of important…
Activities & Achievements
What We Do
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.
The Quality and Reliability of Data Generated by SPEED's Societal Stability Protocol: Mechanisms and Tests
SPEED's Global News Index: An Overview and Assessment
The SPEED’s project capacity to contribute to advances in social research is bounded by the breadth and depth of its information base and the tools employed to mine data from that information base. If events are not captured in an information base – or identified using data mining tools – then…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
The Composition of Religious and Ethnic Groups (CREG) Project
The Composition of Religious and Ethnic Groups (CREG) project is a large-scale effort initiated by the Cline Center as part of its Societal Infrastructures and Development (SID) project. Its objective is to fill an important void in the field of comparative politics by creating a set of time-…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
Definitions of Destabilizing Events in SPEED
This document is designed to provide operators of the EXTRACT suite of programs with an accessible guide to the definition and meaning of events intended to be captured in the Societal Stability Protocol (SSP) with the Social, Political and Economic Event Database (SPEED) project. It is a…
Gauging Civil Unrest with SPEED Data: The Societal Stability Protocol and the Intensity of Civil Unrest
Destabilizing events - whether they are political expression events, politically motivated attacks, disruptive state acts, or some other manifestation of discontent - can vary enormously in their intensity. It is important to capture differences in intensity because they can affect the impact of…