People

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People

Improving societies together.
Worldwide.

Understanding complex social problems is easier when data scientists, social scientists, humanists, and other difference makers can be assembled around the same table. It also means drawing from diverse methods, theories, and perspectives.

At the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, we’re building an innovative community of scholars who not only pursue collaborative text analytics research using our data, software, and expertise, but are deeply invested in promoting societal well-being. The Cline Center affiliates network includes faculty, students, and staff from six colleges at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and from collaborating institutions spread across five continents. 

The Cline Center is a collaborative enterprise that draws faculty, staff, students, and difference-makers from the public and private sectors into interdisciplinary research projects that address real-world problems. Core staff and faculty members working in our Research Park location manage day-to-day operations involving faculty fellows, graduate fellows, research assistants, interns, and analysts. We also support collaborative projects through our network of faculty and research affiliates spanning the Urbana-Champaign campus as well as other institutions across the globe. 

Here’s who is making a difference with the Cline Center.

Zach Jablow
Zach Jablow
2023 Schroeder Fellow
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Zach’s project will shed light on potential biases in how mass media around the world use the most extreme categories of political violence. Usage of the terms “genocide” and “terrorism” are hotly contested by political actors and commentators. As political and social theorists have noted, the names attached to acts of violence carry strong connotations in the popular imagination and influence the way we conceptualize and respond to them. Using data from the Cline Center’s Global News Index, Zach will explore the groups and states to which both Western and non-Western news media apply these terms. Drawing on previous research on the framing of political violence in news reports, he hypothesizes that mass media shield their home country and its allies from association with these contested terms of violence while readily and disproportionately applying them to their country’s adversaries.

Deli Yang Portrait
Deli Yang
2023 Schroeder Fellow
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Deli Yang's research project examines the impact of political apologies on post-conflict reconciliation. Apology diplomacy is often seen as a way to address historical grievances, but in reality, questions about sincerity can lead to increased conflict and mistrust. A major limitation of existing research is that it does not distinguish between different levels of sincerity in apologies. To address this challenge, this project uses a new database obtained through the Cline Center’s Historical Phoenix Event Data Project and the Archer system to examine how the nature of apologies affects diplomatic relations, alliance ties, and bilateral trade.