Penn State Event Data

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.