650 results for search: %E3%80%8C%ED%98%84%EB%AA%85%ED%95%9C%20%ED%8F%B0%ED%8C%85%E3%80%8D%20O6O~5OO~%C6%BC469%20%2049%EC%82%B4%EB%82%A8%EC%84%B1%EC%84%B9%ED%8C%8C%EB%8D%B0%EC%9D%B4%ED%8C%85%2049%EC%82%B4%EB%82%A8%EC%84%B1%EC%84%B9%ED%8C%8C%EB%8F%99%EC%95%84%EB%A6%AC%E2%98%9C49%EC%82%B4%EB%82%A8%EC%84%B1%EC%84%B9%ED%8C%8C%EB%8F%99%ED%98%B8%ED%9A%8C%E2%96%9349%EC%82%B4%EB%82%A8%EC%84%B1%EC%84%B9%ED%8C%8C%EB%A7%8C%EB%82%A8%E2%93%A5%E3%82%89%E5%BF%A6hybridity


Fourth ALGO story

This is the fourth ALGO story.

Data Archaeology for Human Rights in Central America: HRDAG Collaborates with UWCHR

Patrick Ball is kicking himself for a decision he made almost 25 years ago. “I was clever, but I wasn’t smart,” he says ruefully, as he considers the labyrinth of tables and ASCII-encoded keystrings he used to design a database of human rights violations for the pioneering Salvadoran non-governmental Human Rights Commission (CDHES). Now I’m sitting in his office in San Francisco’s Mission District watching over his shoulder, and trying to keep up, as he bangs out code to decipher the priceless data contained in these old files. Created in 1991 and 1992, during the last days of El Salvador’s internal armed conflict, the files detail ...

Reflections: HRDAG Was Born in Washington

I began working with HRDAG in the summer of 2001 before it was ever even called HRDAG. In fact, not intended as a boast, I think I’m responsible for coming up with the name. After contracting with Dr. Patrick Ball for a time writing the Analyzer data management platform, I left New York City and joined him in Washington, DC, at AAAS in 2002. Soon after starting, Patrick decided to establish an identity for this new team, consisting mainly of myself, Miguel Cruz and a handful of field relationships. We discussed what to name it briefly in the AAAS Science & Policy break room, which at the time, being in the mind of unclever descriptive naming ...

Release of Yellow Book Calls on Salvadoran Military to Open Archives

With the release today of a civil war-era catalog of “enemies,” Salvadorans are calling for a new look at the 12-year civil war during which hundreds of citizens were victims of human rights violations such as torture, forced disappearance, and illegal imprisonment. The recently leaked document, known as The Yellow Book, is a list created and (more…)

Counting Civilian Casualties: An Introduction to Recording and Estimating Nonmilitary Deaths in Conflict

ed. by Taylor B. Seybolt, Jay D. Aronson, and Baruch Fischhoff. Oxford University Press. © 2013 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

The following four chapters are included:

— Todd Landman and Anita Gohdes (2013). “A Matter of Convenience: Challenges of Non-Random Data in Analyzing Human Rights Violations in Peru and Sierra Leone.”

— Jeff Klingner and Romesh Silva (2013). “Combining Found Data and Surveys to Measure Conflict Mortality.”

— Daniel Manrique-Vallier, Megan E. Price, and Anita Gohdes (2013). “Multiple-Systems Estimation Techniques for Estimating Casualties in Armed Conflict.”

— Jule Krüger, Patrick Ball, Megan Price, and Amelia Hoover Green (2013). “It Doesn’t Add Up: Methodological and Policy Implications of Conflicting Casualty Data.”


The story of one document inside the AHPN

The beginnings are crucial in every step—as critical as the beginning of sound, life, hope, and justice. Here are some first steps from the AHPN (Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional). This is the story of Oficio Number COC/207-laov, a document that at first appears uninteresting. But this is not just any oficio*. This is one of the many documents that helped bring to trial the people responsible for the disappearance of Edgar Fernando García. A father, husband, son, and student, García was, like many people today, interested in changing his community for the better. (more…)

Ten Years and Counting in Guatemala

We have accomplished so much in the last 10 years at the Historical Archive of the National Police. And yet, despite the efforts, dedication, and commitment of each person who since 2006 has worked in the AHPN, we still can not say “mission accomplished.” In 10 years the environment at the Archive has changed so much and become so full of life. Where the building once sheltered unknown stories, over time some of those stories have been revealed. But Guatemala has a long way to go in letting the world get to know more deeply about the secrets within the documents stored there. Guatemalans and the rest of the world have a very important ...

How much faith can we place in coronavirus antibody tests?

Given a positive test result, what is the probability that an individual has antibodies? This HRDAG-authored Granta article explains the science.

Martus – Paramilitary Protection for Activists


Activist Combines Human Rights and Data Technology


Transitional Justice in Syria: Accountability and Reconciliation Conference

I spent last weekend in Istanbul at an excellent conference organized by the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies (SCPSS). The conference included numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from Syria as well as international human rights researchers and advocates. Families of victims told their stories, data collection groups discussed the challenges, and need, to document violations, transitional justice experts worried about infrastructure such as the police force and judicial system, and local leaders pledged to work together for peace. I was invited to speak about HRDAG's recent report examining killings in Syria documented by ...

Accountability at home and abroad

  Dear friends, Our spirits were really on the ground on Wednesday, but they lifted at the board meeting we had at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group on Thursday. Executive Director Megan Price, Director of Research Patrick Ball, and the Board drafted these thoughts which we'd like to share with you. For more than twenty-five years, we have held heads of state accountable for human rights violations. We support our partners and advocates in the human rights field. They collect data which we analyze using technical and scientific expertise. Those scientific results bring clarity to human rights violence and support the fight for justice. ...

Rapid response: Civilian deaths from weapons used in the Syrian conflict

Megan Price, Anita Gohdes, Jay D. Aronson, and Christopher McNaboe. 2015. BMJ (29 September): 351. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h4736. © The BMJ Publishing Group Ltd. All rights reserved. Open access.


Using Statistics to Assess Lethal Violence in Civil and Inter-State War

Patrick Ball and Megan Price (2019). Using Statistics to Assess Lethal Violence in Civil and Inter-State War. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, Volume 6. 7 March 2019. © 2019 Annual Reviews. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-statistics-030718-105222.

Patrick Ball and Megan Price (2019). Using Statistics to Assess Lethal Violence in Civil and Inter-State War. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application. 7 March 2019. © 2019 Annual Reviews. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-statistics-030718-105222.


A geeky deep-dive: database deduplication to identify victims of human rights violations

In our work, we merge many databases to figure out how many people have been killed in violent conflict. Merging is a lot harder than you might think. Many of the database records refer to the same people--the records are duplicated. We want to identify and link all the records that refer to the same victims so that each victim is counted only once, and so that we can use the structure of overlapping records to do multiple systems estimation. Merging records that refer to the same person is called entity resolution, database deduplication, or record linkage. For definitive overviews of the field, see Scheuren, Herzog, and Winkler, Data Quality ...

More Than 60,000 Have Died in Syrian Conflict, U.N. Says


The Disappearance of Edgar Fernando García


Outreach at Toronto TamilFest for Counting the Dead

Michelle spent a weekend in Toronto, Canada, reaching out to the community at TamilFest, where she and a colleague invited people to sit down and talk.

Counting the Dead in Sri Lanka

ITJP and HRDAG are urging groups inside and outside Sri Lanka to share existing casualty lists.

Changes at HRDAG

A special announcement from the HRDAG Advisory Board: Beginning officially on December 1, HRDAG is changing leadership. After nearly three years as Executive Director, Patrick Ball will become the new Director of Research. Megan Price will be the new Executive Director. Patrick has spent more than 25 years working at the intersection of human rights and statistical science. Over that time, he has finely honed statistical methodology for quantifying mass killings. Now he is excited about the chance to go deeper into research for HRDAG and develop additional approaches for new problems. In his new role, Patrick will focus more on technical coding ...

Our work has been used by truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, and non-governmental human rights organizations. We have worked with partners on projects on five continents.

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