From the article: Esta entidad, que existe desde 1991, es liderada por su fundador, Patrick Ball, un científico que acumula una experiencia de más de 25 años realizando análisis cuantitativos en los lugares y en las situaciones más convulsos del planeta. Sobre su colaboración con el proyecto del predictor de fosas clandestinas en México, único en el mundo, Ball afirmó en entrevista:
“Cuando hablamos de crímenes de lesa humanidad estamos hablando de instituciones, de organizaciones grandes, cometiendo miles o centenares de miles de violaciones a víctimas distribuidas sobre una geografía enorme. Para entender los patrones en esas violaciones, la estadística puede brindar una mirada sobre quiénes son los responsables materiales e intelectuales, quiénes son las víctimas y dónde o cuándo pasaron esas violaciones. Pero la estadística no es contabilidad, pues no estamos hablando solamente de las violaciones que podemos ver, sino que también debemos calcular las violaciones no observadas, las escondidas, invisibles, para incluir en nuestro análisis la totalidad de las violaciones”.
HRDAG is currently evaluating the quality and completeness of the Kosovo Memory Book of the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) in Belgrade, Serbia. The objective of the Kosovo Memory Book (KMB) is to commemorate every single person who fell victim to armed conflict in Kosovo from 1998 to 2000, either through death or disappearance.
While building and reviewing their database, one of the things that HLC has to do is “record linkage,” a process also known as “matching.” Matching determines whether two records are the same people (“a match”) or different people (“a non-match”). Matching helps to identify whether two existing records refer ...
Sloppy recordkeeping by Chicago police has compromised missing persons cases. HRDAG is working with Pulitzer Prize-winning Invisible Institute to shed light on these stories.
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…)
The summer of 2002 in Washington, DC, was steamy and hot, which is how I remember my introduction to HRDAG. I had begun working with them, while they were still at AAAS, in the late spring, learning all about their core concepts: duplicate reporting and MSE, controlled vocabularies, inter-rater reliability, data models and more. The days were long, with a second shift more often than not running late into the evening. In addition to all the learning, I also helped with matching for the Chad project – that is, identifying multiple records of the same violation – back when matching was done by hand. But it was not long after I arrived in Washington ...
Almost a quarter century ago, on November 16, 1989, six Jesuit scholars, their housekeeper and her 15-year-old daughter were massacred inside the University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador, El Salvador. Their chief target was the rector of the country’s leading university. The murders were carried out by members of the elite Atlacatl Battalion, acting on the direct orders of the highest-ranking members of the Salvadoran military. The United Nations–sponsored Truth Commission for El Salvador found that members of the Salvadoran military's high command “gave...the order to kill Father Ignacio Ellacuría and to leave no witnesses.” ...
It took me a while to realize I had become part of the HRDAG incubator—at least that’s what it felt like to me—for young data analysts who wanted to use statistical knowledge to make a real impact on human rights debates.
Over the last few years, we've tried to make the data organized in our projects publicly accessible. We have encouraged our partners to publish the data at the completion of the project. We continue to believe it is important to offer access to the data used in our projects for the sake of transparency as well as to encourage further research and analysis. However, we are increasingly concerned about how raw data are used. Data collected by what we can observe is what statisticians call a convenience sample, which is subject to selection bias.
We're keeping these datasets available for researchers who want to use them for simulation or estimation ...
HRDAG analysis presented by Patrick found that 5 percent of the indigenous Maya Ixil population was killed in a 15-month period.
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.
Amelia Hoover Green. In Collective Violence and International Criminal Justice: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Alette Smeulers, Antwerp, Belgium. © 2010 Intersentia. All rights reserved. [Link coming soon]
Today we celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948. At HRDAG, we are non-partisan: we do not favor any party or government in conflicts. But we are not neutral: we are always in favor of human rights. We believe in the power and value of data; as we see it, data distills human actions and existence, all of which have power and value. With this in mind, we propose these seven articles that comprise our declaration of a few data rights (click through the links for some examples).
Preamble
Whereas data represents the suffering of human beings,
Whereas ...
Paula Amado and María Juliana Durán Fedullo reflect on how the Truth Commission may change Colombia’s history, finally officially acknowledging the 50-year conflict and its casualties, and reckoning with who did what to whom.
Today the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a report prepared by me and my colleagues describing the current state of reported killings in the Syrian Arab Republic from the beginning of the conflict in March 2011 through April 2013. (UN news release here.) This report is an update of work we published in January 2013. This updated analysis includes records from eight data sources documenting a total of 92,901 reported killings.
Our analysis begins with 263,055 total records reported by the eight data sources that include sufficient identifying information (name, date, and location*) to conduct ...
Our partners were eager to learn and talk about emerging decentralized technology.