RIDIR: Collaborative Research: Computational and Historical Resources on Nations and Organizations for the Social Sciences (CHRONOS)

该项目将收集、处理和分析数以百万计的美国政府与国际关系有关的记录，开发工具来探索这些记录，并通过一个应用程序编程接口将所有这些记录都提供给一个网站。该项目将展示计算技术如何帮助在一系列重大公共利益领域进行定性和定量的社会科学研究，扩大关于恐怖主义、情报、国际贸易和援助的知识。在其更广泛的影响中，它将改善可用于多学科研究和教学的基础设施，并使公民、记者和民间社会组织更好地获得有关国际关系的信息。参与的学生研究人员将了解--并为--在“大数据”时代保持政府透明和问责的实用方法做出贡献。数字化或“天生数字”文档的指数增长将使这些方法在未来几年变得越来越重要。为了迎接挑战，该团队将利用自然语言处理方面的新工作，定制现有的将文本转换为数据的工具，并开发用于历史文档的新工具。他们将使用命名实体识别技术来提取人、国家和组织的名称，使用户能够跟踪大型数字档案中提及的绝对和相对频率。通过主题建模，他们将总结主题内容，并展示最重要的主题如何随着时间的推移而变化。而社交网络提取将使他们能够揭示塑造日常政策的非正式关系。通过将所有这些量化的解密数据集中在一个平台上，该项目将推动政治学家以及传播和社交网络学者的工作，他们试图了解组织内部和组织之间的议程设置、权力和影响力。该平台将使研究人员能够测试投资者关系理论中的基本问题，例如政策制定者是否像现实主义者所坚持的那样，通常从“国家安全”的角度相互交谈，或者像自由主义假设的那样，从“国际规范”的角度进行对话。它将允许用户在不同的分析级别之间切换，从整个档案的汇总视图，到元数据的筛选子集，再到产生单个数据点的一句话中的特定词语。它将把国际关系研究的定量和定性方法结合起来，使两者都更加透明、严格和可复制。

This project will collect, process, and analyze millions of U.S. government records concerning international relations, develop tools to explore these records, and make all of them available on a single website with an Application Programming Interface. The project will demonstrate how computational techniques can aid both qualitative and quantitative social science research on a range of areas of major public interest, expanding knowledge about terrorism, intelligence, international trade and aid. Among its broader impacts, it will improve the infrastructure available for multidisciplinary research and teaching, and also give citizens, journalists, and civil society organizations much better access to information about international relations. Participating student researchers will both learn about -- and contribute to -- practical methods to keep government transparent and accountable in the age of "big data."The exponential growth in digitized or "born digital" documents will make such methods increasingly important in years to come. To meet the challenge, the team will draw on new work in Natural Language Processing, customize existing tools that turn text into data, and develop new tools for use with historical documents. They will employ Named Entity Recognition techniques to extract names of people, countries, and organizations, enabling users to track the absolute and relative frequency of mentions in large digital archives. Through Topic Modeling, they will summarize the thematic content and show how the most important subjects change over time. And Social Network extraction will allow them to reveal the informal relationships that shape policy from day-to-day. By bringing together all of this quantitative declassified data in a single platform, the project will advance work by political scientists as well as scholars of communications and social networks who seek to understand agenda-setting, power, and influence within and between organizations. The platform will enable researchers to test fundamental questions in IR theory, such as whether policymakers generally speak to one another in terms of "state security," as realists insist, or "international norms," as liberalism assumes. It will allow users to shift between different levels of analysis, from an aggregate view of whole archives, to filtered subsets of metadata, to the specific words in one sentence that produced a single data point. It will bring together quantitative and qualitative approaches to research in international relations, and make both more transparent, rigorous, and replicable.