The Global Data on Events, Location and Tone promises to be the ultimate big database - and an amazing tool for data journalists. But what is it?

Everybody is searching for bigger and bigger data: how about this? A comprehensive list of every event in human history.

It matters because historians have long feared that we live in a digital dark ages - where our history will have vanished when future generations try to look back on these electronic decades.

That is the purpose of GDELT: Global Data on Events, Location and Tone. Primarily set up by Kalev Leetaru at the University of Illinois it is literally a giant list: over 250m events in over 300 categories from riots and protests to diplomatic exchanges and peace appeals. Crucially, it contains latitude and longitude for every event - all of them are now geotagged to city level.

It's based on an impressive rosta of news media: AfricaNews, Agence France Presse, Associated Press Online, Associated Press Worldstream, BBC Monitoring, Christian Science Monitor, Facts on File, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, United Press International, and the Washington Post. They include "all national and international news coverage from the New York Times, all international and major US national stories from the Associated Press, and all national and international news from Google News with the exception of sports, entertainment, and strictly economic news."

And while it only goes back to 1979 now, eventually it will include all events back to 1800.

Launched only recently, it's been used a PhD Jay Yonamine to predict violence in Afghanistan. He says that

From a forecasting perspective, the benefits of a machine-coded dataset updated in (near) real-time that provides specific latitude-longitude coordinates are numerous.

Interestingly, his paper points out that the news media probably does as good a job as official - but classified - data like Wikileaks when it comes to mapping that conflict.

The categories the team use could themselves be the subject of a dissertation: a 300-strong taxonomy, CAMEO, developed by Penn State's Philip A. Schrodt.

Says Kalev Leetaru (and his paper is worth reading too)



The goal of the project is to create a free and open global resource for the quantitative study and mapping of global conflict and cooperation and thus the data is being made available completely free and open for any use.

You can read more on this from Foreign Policy

It's a truly impressive project: and a power tool for anyone interested in data journalism too. Imagine being able to map every military action in Iraq in a moment, or provide a detailed verified guide to the Arab Spring? This would be a good place to start

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