“If something doesn’t get reported in a newspaper or a similar outlet, it will not appear in any of these databases, no matter how important it really is,” says Lazer, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer and Information Sciences who also co-directs the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. The systems were also vulnerable to missing news. ICEWS’ track record was better, but the system reported the same event more than once, jacking up the protest count. Next they assessed the systems’ validity: Did the protest events reported actually occur? Here they found that only 21 percent of GDELT’s reported events referred to real protests. Distinguished Professor David Lazerįirst the researchers tested the systems’ reliability: Did they all detect the same protest events in Latin America? The answer was “not very well.” ICEWS and GDELT, they found, rarely reported the same protests, and ICEWS and SPEED agreed on just 10.3 percent of them. That’s not so for a set of computational rules. It’s so easy for us as humans to read something and know what it means. The others were the hand-coded Gold Standard Report, or GSR, generated by the nonprofit MITRE Corp., and the Social, Political, and Economic Event Database, or SPEED, at the University of Illinois, which uses both human and automated coding. The fully automated systems studied were the International Crisis Early Warning System, or ICEWS, maintained by Lockheed Martin, and Global Data on Events Language and Tone, or GDELT, developed and run out of Georgetown University. In new research published Thursday in the journal Science, Northeastern network scientist David Lazer and his colleagues analyzed the effectiveness of four global-scale databases and found they are falling short when tested for reliability and validity. #Sing up itrace codeThese systems code and collect vast stores of real-time “event data”-happenings gleaned from news articles covering everything from political protests to ecological shifts around the world. In the age of Big Data, automated systems can track societal events on a global scale.
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