Machine Coding of Event Data Using Regional and International Sources

Abstract

This article discusses research on the machine coding of international event data from international and regional news sources using the Kansas Event Data System (KEDS). First, we suggest that the definition of an "event" should be modified so that events are explicitly and unambiguously defined in terms of natural language. Second, we discuss KEDS: a Macintoshbased machine coding system using pattern recognition and simple linguistic parsing to code events using the WEIS event categories. Third, we compare the Reuters international news service reports with those of two specialized regional sources: the foreign policy chronologies in the Journal of Palestine Studies and the German language biweekly publication Informationen. We conclude by noting that machine coding, when combined with the numerous sources of machine readable text that have become available in the past decade, has the potential to provide a much richer source of event data on international political interactions than that currently available. The ease of machine coding should encourage the creation of event coding schemes developed to address specific theoretical concerns; the increased density of these new data sets may allow the study of problems that could not be analyzed before.

How to Analyze Political Attention with Minimal Assumptions and Costs

“…Examples include Gerner et al (1994), Cary (1977), and Holsti, Brody, and North (1964). In dictionary-based coding, the analyst develops a list (a dictionary) of words and phrases that are likely to indicate membership in a particular category.…”

“…For example, event data coding in international relations has benefited enormously from the automated coding of news wire feeds using dictionaries created by the Kansas Event Data system (Gerner et al 1994), and the Policy Agendas and Congressional Bills Projects have moved toward the use of supervised learning techniques to supplement human coding Wilkerson 2007, 2008). When automated approaches substitute computers for humans, the costs of coding are reduced and the reliability is increased (King and Lowe 2003).…”

A Method of Automated Nonparametric Content Analysis for Social Science

“…In contrast, the latter so-called "supervised learning methods," which require a choice of categories and a sample of hand-coded documents, have the advantage of letting the social scientist, rather than the computer program, determine the most theoretically interesting questions (Kolari, Finin, and Joshi 2006;Laver, Benoit, and Garry 2003;Pang, Lee, and Vaithyanathan 2002). These approaches, and others such as dictionary-based methods (Gerner et al 1994;King and Lowe 2003), accomplish somewhat different tasks and so can often be productively used together, such as for discovering a relevant set of categories in part from the data.…”

What Should We Do about Source Selection in Event Data? Challenges, Progress, and Possible Solutions

“…Almeida and Lichbach 2003;Bond et al 1997;Earl and Kimport 2011;Gerner et al 1994;King and Lowe 2003;Shellman 2008;Schrodt 2012;Chojnacki et al 2012;Leetaru and Schrodt 2013;Hanna 2014;Jenkins et al 2014). But this promise confronts a major challenge in terms of our ability to say much about the representativeness of protest event data.…”

“…The development of the Internet and the availability of integrated online news archives such as Factiva and Lexis Nexis coupled with the development of computational tools for coding large amounts of electronic text into event data promises the possibility of constructing multisource event data sets (Bond, et al 1997;Gerner et al 1994;King and Lowe 2003;Shellman 2008;Schrodt 2012;Leetaru and Schrodt 2013;Hanna 2014;Jenkins et al 2014). Despite this promise, this development confronts several challenges.…”