Trina Reynolds-Tyler's internship at HRDAG helped her use data science to find patterns in state-sanctioned violence.
The Colombian Truth Commission (CEV), the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) have worked together to integrate data and calculate statistical estimates of the number of victims of the armed conflict, including homicides, forced disappearances, kidnapping, and the recruitment of child soldiers. Data are available through National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), the Truth Commission, and GitHub. Published in 2023.
The Colombian Truth Commission (CEV), the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) have worked together to integrate data and calculate statistical estimates of the number of victims of the armed conflict, including homicides, forced disappearances, kidnapping, and the recruitment of child soldiers. Data are available through National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), the Truth Commission, and GitHub.
Sarah L. Desmarais and Evan M. Lowder (2019). Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools: A Primer for Judges, Prosecutors, and Defense Attorneys. Safety and Justice Challenge, February 2019. © 2019 Safety and Justice Challenge. <<HRDAG's Kristian Lum and Tarak Shah served as Project Members and made contributions to the primer.>>
Sarah L. Desmarais and Evan M. Lowder (2019). Pretrial Risk Assessment Tools: A Primer for Judges, Prosecutors, and Defense Attorneys. Safety and Justice Challenge, February 2019. © 2019 Safety and Justice Challenge. <<HRDAG’s Kristian Lum and Tarak Shah served as Project Members and made significant contributions to the primer.>>
What follows is an elaborate criss-crossing of collaborations—retreat is a time to embrace the productivity that comes with being in the same room.
On the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, HRDAG executive director Megan Price tells us why she loves her work, and why she feels hopeful about the future.
HRDAG built a machine-learning tool to strip the raw data of any potentially identifying information such as names and court case numbers. There was no "acceptable error rate."
Violations de droits de l'homme par l'Etat tchadien sous le régime de Hissène Habré
[English]
Quels sont les principaux résultats de ce rapport?
Quelles violations de droits de l'homme commises dans les prisons de la DDS ont été prouvées?
Quelle preuve il y a t-il que Habré et la direction de la DDS étaient responsables pour ces violations de droits de l'homme?
D'où proviennent les documents internes de la DDS?
En quelle mesure l'analyse comprise dans le rapport contribue t-elle a l'affaire judiciaire Hissène Habré?
Est-ce que HRDAG donne des estimations concernant le nombre total de personnes tuées dans les prisons par la DDS - les ...
How we work with partners is how we relate to the whole human rights community. We work with human rights advocates and defenders to support their goals by complementing their substantive expertise with our technical expertise. To date, partners have included truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, United Nations missions, and non-governmental human rights organizations on five continents.
Here are a few stories that illustrate how we work with our partners:
HRDAG partner stories:
Quantifying Police Misconduct in Louisiana (2023)
Scraping for Pattern: Protecting Immigrant Rights in Washington State (2022)
Police Violence ...
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 ...
The first time I met anyone at HRDAG, I was a journalist. It was 2006. I was working on a story about a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon who’d collaborated with the organization on a survey in Sierra Leone, and I contacted Patrick Ball to discuss the work. At the time, I found him challenging.
But I thought his work—trying to estimate how many people were killed, or, in that study, otherwise injured, during wars—was fascinating. Over the next few years, I got to know other researchers working on similar questions. In 2008, as the war in Iraq ramped up, I spoke with epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins University, the World Health Organiz...
HRDAG assisted the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission in building a systematic data coding system, electronic database, and secure data analysis process to manage the thousands of statements given to them in the course of their work. HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball and HRDAG field consultant Richard Conibere worked at the TRC full-time for approximately eighteen months starting in March 2003.
HRDAG worked with TRC researchers to help them incorporate quantitative findings to support the qualitative findings in their writing for the other chapters of the TRC report. In addition, HRDAG produced a Statistical Appendix to present ...
The data on killings in Kosovo are in four files. All of the files are comma-delimited ASCII. The fields in each file are described below.
If you use these data on Kosovo killings, please cite them with the following citation, as well as this note:
“These are convenience sample data, and as such they are not a statistically representative sample of events in this conflict. These data do not support conclusions about patterns, trends, or other substantive comparisons (such as over time, space, ethnicity, age, etc.).”
Patrick Ball, Wendy Betts, Fritz Scheuren, Jana Dudukovich, and Jana Asher. (2002). AAAS/ABA-CEELI/Human Rights Data ...
This post describes how we organize our work over ten years, twenty analysts, dozens of countries, and hundreds of projects: we start with a task. A task is a single chunk of work, a quantum of workflow. Each task is self-contained and self-documenting; I'll talk about these ideas at length below. We try to keep each task as small as possible, which makes it easy to understand what the task is doing, and how to test whether the results are correct.
In the example I'll describe here, I'm going to describe work from our Syria database matching project, which includes about 100 tasks. I'll start with the first thing we do with files we receive ...
Earlier this year, the Canadian Tamil Congress connected with HRDAG to bring its campaign to Toronto’s annual Tamil Fest, one of the largest gatherings of Canada’s Sri Lankan diaspora.
Ravichandradeva, along with a few other volunteers, spent the weekend speaking with festival-goers in Scarborough about the project and encouraging them to come forward with information about deceased or missing loved ones and friends.
“The idea is to collect thorough, scientifically rigorous numbers on the total casualties in the war and present them as a non-partisan, independent organization,” said Michelle Dukich, a data consultant with HRDAG.
Ayyub Ibrahim, Huy Dao, and Tarak Shah (2024). “Innocence Discovery Lab - Harnessing Large Language Models to Surface Data Buried in Wrongful Conviction Case Documents." The Wrongful Conviction Law Review 5 (1):103-25. https://doi.org/10.29173/wclawr112. 31 May, 2024. Copyright (c) 2024 Ayyub Ibrahim, Huy Dao, Tarak Shah. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Ayyub Ibrahim, Huy Dao, and Tarak Shah (2024). “Innocence Discovery Lab – Harnessing Large Language Models to Surface Data Buried in Wrongful Conviction Case Documents.” The Wrongful Conviction Law Review 5 (1):103-25. https://doi.org/10.29173/wclawr112. 31 May, 2024. Copyright (c) 2024 Ayyub Ibrahim, Huy Dao, Tarak Shah. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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.”
Field Consultant
Carolina Lopéz has worked with the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional (AHPN) in Guatemala for eight years, and is currently a member of the Archive Technical Coordination team. A professional working within the social sciences, she prefers using alternative research on past practices to develop an understanding of the present. Her work consists primarily of monitoring and creating strategies to systematize, track and create process controls. She also has thorough knowledge of management of historical archive documents.
Since 2006, Carolina has worked in quantitative research at the AHPN with HRDAG team members Patrick ...
