Who
Utkarsh Hardia, Marcus Gubanyi,
Dr. Ashok Samal, Dr. Courtney Hillebrecht
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
What
Human rights are the basic rights and freedoms to
which all human beings are entitled. They include
civil and political rights, the right to life and liberty,
freedom of thought and speech, equality before the
law, social, cultural and economic rights, the right
to food, the right to work, and the right to education.
While human rights violations vary in scope and
duration, they are present in nearly every country
and occur with remarkable frequency. We strive to
identify documents related to human rights violations,
determine the spatial and temporal coordinate of the
incidents, categorize the types and actors of incidents, and analyze
spatiotemporal patterns of human rights violations.
Why
Documentation of human rights violations is spotty
and not well organized. This has caused difficulties in
quantifiably researching these violations.
With the expansion of the Internet, widespread use of social media,
and use of big data methods, it is now possible
to develop an accurate catalog of such incidents.
Social scientists may seek tools in which they can
analyze human rights violations at a large scale.
This website is developed for researchers such as these.
How
The current source of data for the website is the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) - http://gdeltproject.org/.
Other data sources including articles from local and national newspapers, and tweets from twitter are in the works. Data from GDELT
is provided with a type. We group types into three tiers based on relavancy to human rights violations, with Tier 1 being most relevant.
Work is in progress on mining data sources other than GDELT and classifying articles as human rights violations.