Automated Coding of Political Event Data

Political event data have long been used in the quantitative study of international politics, dating back to the early efforts of Edward Azar’s COPDAB [1] andCharles McClelland’s WEIS [18] as well as a variety of more specialized efforts such as Leng’s BCOW [16]. By the late 1980s, the NSF-funded Data Development in International Relations project [20] had identified event data as the second most common form of data—behind the various Correlates of War data sets— used in quantitative studies. The 1990s saw the development of two practical automated event data coding systems, the NSF-funded KEDS (http://eventdata. psu.edu; [9, 31, 33]) and the proprietary VRA-Reader (http://vranet.com; [15, 27]) and in the 2000s, the development of two new political event coding ontologies— CAMEO [34] and IDEA[4,27]—designed for implementation in automated coding systems. A summary of the current status of political event projects, as well as detailed discussions of some of these, can be found in [10, 32].

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