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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 ...
Yezidi Activists Teach HRDAG about Human Rights – updated
UPDATE (21 Dec 2014): Juan Cole is reporting that the Kurdish militia (the peshmerga) have retaken Shingal (also known as Sinjar) mountain where many Yezidi people have been trapped since 3 August 2014. They are now moving to liberate other Yezidi towns south of the mountain. The Yezidi people trapped on the mountain are now free. There is no word yet on the thousands of Yezidi people enslaved by ISIS.
ORIGINAL (19 Nov 2014): Farhad (not his real name) got the call from ISIS on his personal cell phone just after lunch: we have your sister, and we will give her back if you pay us $6000, plus $1500 for the driver.
Carrying little more than his ...
How to Become a Data Scientist: My Lessons at HRDAG
I will use the skills and culture I learned from HRDAG’s team to understand how the conflict has affected the people in my country.
USA
HRDAG’s analysis and expertise continues to deepen the national conversation about police violence and criminal justice reform in the United States. In 2015 we began by considering undocumented victims of police violence, relying on the same methodological approach we’ve tested internationally for decades. Shortly after, we examined “predictive policing” software, and demonstrated the ways that racial bias is baked into the algorithms. Following our partners’ lead, we next considered the impact of bail, and found that setting bail increases the likelihood of a defendant being found guilty. We then broadened our investigations to examine ...
CIIDH Data – Dictionary
Version date: 2000.01.29
Current version: ATV20.1
Patrick Ball & Herbert F. Spirer
The unit of analysis for each record in this structure is VIOLATION.
Each violation was of a particular type, happened at a particular time and place, and was committed by zero, one, or several organizational perpetrators. The violation was committed against zero or one named (individually identified) victim, and zero or more anonymous (unidentified) additional victims. The violation was reported one or more times in one, two, or three source types.
Note that to count the number of times individuals suffered particular violations, users should sum either the ...
Core Concepts
Inaccurate statistics can damage the credibility of human rights claims—and that's why we strive to ensure that statistics about human rights violations are generated with as much rigor and are as scientifically accurate as possible.
But, what are the pitfalls leading to inaccuracy—when, where, and how do data become compromised? How are patterns biased by having only partial data? And what are the best scientific methods for collecting, managing, processing and analyzing data?
Here are the data pitfalls that HRDAG has identified, as well as some of our approaches for meeting these challenges. We believe that human rights researchers must take ...
Casanare, Colombia
Text in English
[popup citation="Tamy Guberek, Daniel Guzmán, Megan Price, Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball. (2010). Benetech/Human Rights Data Analysis Group database of lethal violence in Casanare."]
Estimaciones de Homicidios y Desapariciones en Casanare
Casanare es un departamento extenso y rural de Colombia con 19 municipios y una población de casi 300.000 habitantes. Ubicado entre las faldas de los Andes y las planicies orientales, Casanare tiene una larga historia de violencia. Diversos grupos armados han hecho presencia en Casanare, entre ellos paramilitares, guerrillas y el ejército colombiano. Muchos habitantes del Casanare han sido vícti...
Learning to Learn: Reflections on My Time at HRDAG
So much of what I learned at HRDAG was intangible, and I'm grateful to have been able to go deep.
Training with HRDAG: Rules for Organizing Data and More
I had the pleasure of working with Patrick Ball at the HRDAG office in San Francisco for a week during summer 2016. I knew Patrick from two workshops he previously hosted at the University of Washington’s Centre for Human Rights (UWCHR). The workshops were indispensable to us at UWCHR as we worked to publish a number of datasets on human rights violations during the El Salvador Civil War. The training was all the more helpful because the HRDAG team was so familiar with the data. As part of an impressive career which took him from Ethiopia and Kosovo to Haiti and El Salvador among others, Patrick himself had worked on gathering and analysing ...
HRDAG and the Digital Commons
One of the three main goals of HRDAG is education and outreach, and to that end we use Creative Commons licenses for all of our blogposts and, whenever possible, for our publications. Using a Creative Commons license makes it clear that educators are free to use HRDAG's publications, in their entirety, and with the peace of mind that they are doing so with our blessing.
Also, the use of the Creative Commons license allows us to participate in and encourage the creation of a digital commons, which we feel helps to advance another one of our goals, the creation of knowledge. We feel that it’s important to offer up our publications for use and reuse ...
Communiqué de presse, Tchad, January 2010
Une Nouvelle Etude Démontre qu’ Hissène Habré supervisait les Prisons de la Police Politique où des Milliers de Personnes Sont Décédées.
10ème Anniversaire de l’Inculpation de l’Ancien Dictateur Tchadien
Janvier 29, 2010, N’Djaména, Tchad, Palo Alto, CA, Etats-Unis – A l’occasion du 10ème anniversaire de la première mise en accusation d’Hissène Habré au Sénégal, le Groupe d'Analyse des Données de Droits Humains de Benetech (GADDH) a réalisé une nouvelle étude qui démontre que l’ancien dictateur tchadien était bien informé des politiques et des pratiques de sa police politique. Cette étude pourrait s’avérer ...
Reflections: It Began In Bogotá
It was July of 2006, I’d spent five years working at a local human rights NGO in Bogotá, and I had reached retirement age. But then a whole new world opened up for me to discover. Tamy Guberek, then HRDAG Latin America coordinator, whom I had met at the NGO, approached me about becoming part of the HRDAG Colombia team as a research/administrative assistant. Over a cup of suitably Colombian coffee, the deal was quickly "signed.” My responsibilities ranged from fundraising to translations, from support in data gathering for estimates on homicides and disappearances in various regions of Colombia to editorial support to different Benetech-HRDAG ...
The Art and Science of Coding AHPN Documents
The coding, from my perspective, is the heart of the project. I say this, because the coding team has the responsibility of selecting documents according to the random sample, recording the documents’ contents, and applying the criteria to convert that content into an entry in a quantitative database. Not to mention the fact that this team has the privilege of being in direct contact with the documents.
At present, because of advanced organizational processes, not everyone has a chance to hold an original document in their hands. The quantitative study had many advantages in this regard; since we started work in parallel with the archival ...
12 Questions about Using Data Analysis to Bring Guatemalan War Criminals to Justice
When people talk about war criminals in Guatemala, which war are they talking about?
They’re talking about the Guatemalan civil war, which began in 1960 and ended in 1996. That’s thirty-six years of civil war. Even though it ended almost two decades ago, Guatemala is still recovering from it. At its simplest, this civil war story was right-wing government forces fighting leftist rebels. But it went deeper than that, of course. The majority of the rebel forces was composed of indigenous peoples, primarily the Maya, (more…)
Guatemala’s Bol de la Cruz Found Guilty
Today Guatemala’s former national police chief Colonel Héctor Rafael Bol de la Cruz was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison for his role in the 1984 kidnapping and disappearance of 27-year-old student union leader Fernando Garcia, who was last seen when officers detained him outside his home. Along with Bol de la Cruz, former senior police officer Jorge Gomez was also tried; he received a sentence of 40 years in prison. That verdict comes in part because of testimony this month by HRDAG’s Patrick Ball, who served as an expert witness and presented data analysis done with colleague Daniel Guzmán to assess the flow of thousands of ...
Reflections: Challenging Tasks and Meticulous Defenders
I have made it my personal objective to amplify HRDAG's message of being extra careful and scientifically rigorous with human rights data.
Patrick Ball wins the Karl E. Peace Award
Patrick Ball won the Karl E. Peace Award for Outstanding Statistical Contributions for the Betterment of Society at the 2018 Joint Statistical Meeting.
HRDAG Names New Board Member William Isaac
William Isaac joins HRDAG's Advisory Board, bringing expertise in fairness and artificial intelligence.
HRDAG’s Year in Review: 2022
This past year at HRDAG has been about continuing efforts to uncover the truth.
HRDAG and the Allegheny Family Screening Tool
The Associated Press published an article about an investigation that HRDAG and the ACLU have been working on for more than a year. The article explains how the ACLU became involved in an examination of a tool that relies on artificial intelligence to predict which children could be at risk of harm. The tool is used by the Department of Human Services and the child welfare system in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Both the ACLU and the Department of Justice became concerned that the Family Screening Tool, as it is called, was “forever flagging” parents with disabilities and disproportionately removing their children to foster care.
The team’s ...