Collaborative Research: Automated Real-time Production of Political Indicators

政权类型、内部不稳定和国家间冲突等政治特征的系统指标在过去三十年中广泛用于政治和经济研究，并越来越多地用于政策应用。这些指标一般是由个别研究项目使用人工编码员编制的，要经过相当长的时间才能广泛获得，因此在自动化编制这些指标方面所作的努力有限。与此同时，计算机软件和硬件的改进使得分析大量文本以提取有意义信息的过程更加高效。自动编码是透明的，没有人类编码不可复制的主观因素，一旦准备好源文本，就可以快速有效地进行编码，以解释新的理论或技术观点。使用现有的自动编码工具，该项目将产生近乎实时的政治指标，这些指标将与人类编码产生的指标相媲美，如果不是完全相同的话。该项目首先创建了本世纪各国互动事件的数据。此外，该项目将提取政府特征和行为的度量，包括人权实践和专制程度。最后，该项目将构建有关国家间国家间争端的信息。在世界政治领域，大多数科学分析都是基于至少10年前的数据。这项研究将大大减少当代世界事件与学术和政策领域对这些事件进行系统测量和分析之间的时间差，将公开获得系统数据的延迟从几十年缩短到几周。此外，该项目将以透明和广泛可访问的方式公开这些数据。不仅收集数据的人可以获得这些数据，而且任何人都可以通过网络界面免费访问这些数据。该项目将使最近的模式和变化，如中国的崛起，更容易反映在对世界事务的科学研究中。这应该为在全球一级更加准确和日益可信地理解政治提供一个持续的基础。

Systematic indicators of political characteristics such as regime type, internal instability, and inter-state conflict have been widely used in political and economic research over the past three decades and are increasingly used in policy applications. There has been limited effort to automate the production of such indicators, which are generally produced by individual research projects using human coders and are widely available only after a considerable delay. Improvements in computer software and hardware, meanwhile, have made the process of analyzing large bodies of text to extract meaningful information much more efficient. Automated coding is transparent, without the unreproducible subjective elements of human coding, and once the source texts have been prepared, recoding to account for new theoretical or technological perspectives can be done quickly and efficiently. Using extant tools for automated coding, this project will produce near real-time political indicators that will be comparable, if not identical, to indicators produced by human coding. The project first creates data on the interaction events of nations in the current century. In addition, the project will extract measurements of the characteristics and behaviors of governments, including human rights practices and the level of autocracy. Finally, the project will construct information about the interstate disputes among nations.In the realm of world politics, most scientific analysis is based on data that are at least a decade old. This research will significantly reduce the time-lag between events in the contemporary world and systematic measurement and analysis of those events in the academic and policy arena by reducing to weeks from decades the delay with which systematic data are made publicly available. Moreover, this project will expose these data in a transparent and widely accessible way. Not only will the data be available to those who collected the data, but they will be freely accessible to any and all via a web interface. The project will permit recent patterns and changes, such as the rise of China, to be more readily reflected in scientific research on world affairs. This should provide a continuing foundation for more accurate and increasingly credible understandings of politics at the global level.