Activities & Achievements

This grant funds a proof-of-concept study for an authoritative national database of police-involved shootings. It aims to demonstrate machine learning technologies to detect and classify stories about these events and help to establish whether systemic bias exists, its implications, and how it…

The 2018 Collaborative Research on Extreme-Scale Text Analytics (CRESTA) workshop was held on February 1-4, 2018, on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. The theme for this workshop was “Text Analytics Applications for Monitoring and
Understand Contentious…

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 David F. Linowes Faculty Fellows Program is made possible by a generous gift from the Linowes family. The Linowes Fellowship provides exceptionally promising tenure-stream faculty with opportunities for innovation and discovery using the Cline Center’s data holdings and/or analytic tools.…

The Schroeder Summer Graduate Fellowship Program is made possible by a generous gift from William A. and Paul W. Schroeder. The aim of the program is to enhance the quality of rigorous research on topics that fall within on-going research programs at the Cline Center by helping graduate students…

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…

In looking at the remarkable proliferation of democracies since 1974, this volume offers important insight into the challenges and opportunities that democracy faces in the twenty-first century. Distinguished contributors detail difficulties that democracies face from within and how they deal…

Social scientists have long criticized American voters for being "unsophisticated" in the way they acquire and use political information. The low level of political sophistication leaves them vulnerable to manipulation by political "elites," whose sway over voters is deemed incontrovertible and…

This PowerPoint presentation was presented at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association on September 3-6, 2009. It provides an overview of research on national institutions, societal contexts and societal welfare, broadly defined.

Democracy enjoys unparalleled prestige at the beginning of the twenty-first century as a form of government. Some of the world's most prosperous nations are democracies, and an array of nations in Europe, Africa, and South America have adopted the system. This globalization has also met…

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…

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…

The Merriam Scholars Program was a program funded by the Merriam Endowment in which two faculty members, chosen by the Cline Center, were annual appointed as Merriam Scholars. Due to the terms of the Merriam Endowment appointments were limited to members of the Political Science faculty at the…

"Big data" in the form of unstructured text poses challenges and opportunities to social scientists committed to advancing research frontiers. Because machine-based and humancentric approaches to content analysis have different strengths for extracting information from unstructured text, we…

There are a number of data science resources at the University of Illinois that support research in the social sciences and digital humanities. Use the link below to view a list (in alphabetical order) of the groups who are conducting extreme-scale social science and digital humanities research…