Penn State Event Data: Difference between revisions
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* The last column is a textual description of the WEIS event type. | * The last column is a textual description of the WEIS event type. | ||
The WEIS event types have been mapped to a numerical cooperation/conflict scale (called '''Goldstein weights''') where a positive '''event weight''' indicates a cooperative or friendly event and a negative weight indicates a conflictive or hostile event. The mapping from WEIS codes to Goldstein weights is available in the file [[Media:Goldstein_weights.zip|'''Goldstein_weights.zip''']]. | |||
To make use of these event weights we have to merge them into the event table. This can be done with any software that supports to join tables; for instance with '''R'''. | |||
gulf.data <- read.table("GULF99.ALL.events", header = TRUE, sep = "\t") | |||
Revision as of 13:49, 1 August 2012
The Penn State Event Data Project (formerly Kansas Event Data System) is a long term project aimed at collecting events among political actors. The events are extracted from regular news reports in a semi-automatic fashion. Specifically, we use data encoding events in or around the Persian Gulf region in the time from 1979 to 1999 available at http://eventdata.psu.edu/data.dir/gulf.html under the link Gulf data coded from full stories. This data set consists of more than 304 thousand events; the first lines in the file look like this.
790415 USA SAU 042 ENDORSE 790415 SAU USA 081 MAKE AGREEME 790415 EEC UNK 031 MEET 790415 KEN TAZ 211 SEIZE POSSES 790415 BEL ZAR 032 VISIT ...
The file encodes a tab-separated table whose rows have the following components (from left to right).
- A 6-digit number encodes the time when the event happened, given by the day. For instance, the string 790415 refers to April 15, 1979.
- The source actor is the one who initiates the event. This can be a country (e.g., SAU for Saudi Arabia), an organization (e.g., UNO), or - depending on the data set - even an individual person.
- The target actor is the recipient of the event and is coded in the same way as the source.
- The event type is a three-digit number giving the event code as defined in the World Event/Interaction Survey (WEIS) project. It specifies what happened in the event.
- The last column is a textual description of the WEIS event type.
The WEIS event types have been mapped to a numerical cooperation/conflict scale (called Goldstein weights) where a positive event weight indicates a cooperative or friendly event and a negative weight indicates a conflictive or hostile event. The mapping from WEIS codes to Goldstein weights is available in the file Goldstein_weights.zip.
To make use of these event weights we have to merge them into the event table. This can be done with any software that supports to join tables; for instance with R.
gulf.data <- read.table("GULF99.ALL.events", header = TRUE, sep = "\t")