HRDAG analysis presented by Patrick found that 5 percent of the indigenous Maya Ixil population was killed in a 15-month period.
HRDAGâs core values all have a connection to Scott Weikart, 1951â2023.
Maria Gargiulo, MarĂa Julia DurĂĄn, Paula Andrea Amado, and Patrick Ball (2024). verdata: An R package for analyzing data from the Truth Commission in Colombia. The Journal of Open Source Software. 6 January, 2024. 9(93), 5844, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.05844. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Maria Gargiulo, MarĂa Julia DurĂĄn, Paula Andrea Amado, and Patrick Ball (2024). verdata: An R package for analyzing data from the Truth Commission in Colombia. The Journal of Open Source Software. 6 January, 2024. 9(93), 5844, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.05844. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
We have specified "Some Rights Reserved" on our website, instead of the more conventional "All Rights Reserved." This is because some of our web content is covered by a Creative Commons license, which means that it may be copied and even re-purposed, with some stipulations. We have made this decision because HRDAG wants to contribute to the digital commons, defined by Creative Commons as "a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law."
Our Creative Commons License
We are using the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, also known as the BY-NC-SA license. Here is ...
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.
In July 2009, The Human Rights Data Analysis Group concluded a three-year project with the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help clarify Liberiaâs violent history and hold perpetrators of human rights abuses accountable for their actions. In the course of this work, HRDAG analyzed more than 17,000 victim and witness statements collected by the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and compiled the data into a report entitled âDescriptive Statistics From Statements to the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.â
Liberian TRC data and the accompanying data dictionary
anonymized-statgivers.csv contains information ...
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 ...
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 ârecord linkage,â a process also known as âmatching.â Matching determines whether two records are the same people (âa matchâ) or different people (âa non-matchâ). Matching helps to identify whether two existing records refer ...
Multiple Systems Estimation
What is MSE?
What do you mean by statistical inference?
What is an overlap, and how do we know when lists overlap?
How does MSE find the total number of violations?
How was MSE originally developed?
How does the Benetech Human Rights Program use MSE?
1. What is MSE?
A: Multiple Systems Estimation, or MSE, is a family of techniques for statistical inference. MSE uses the overlaps between several incomplete lists of human rights violations to determine the total number of violations.
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2. What do you mean by statistical inference?
A: ...
âRevolution Analytics will allow HRDAG to handle bigger data sets and leverage the power of R to accomplish this goal and uncover the truth.â Director of Research Megan Price is quoted
From the Guatemalan military to the South African apartheid police, code cruncher Patrick Ball singles out the perpetrators of political violence.
Excerpt:
Data scientists are programmers who ignore probability but like pretty graphs, said Patrick Ball, a statistician and human rights advocate who cofounded the Human Rights Data Analysis Group.
âData is broken,â Ball said. âAnyone who thinks theyâre going to use big data to solve a problem is already on the path to fantasy land.â
Weâre happy to announce that our executive director, Patrick Ball, has been presented an honorary degree from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. University President Deborah Freund presented the degree to Patrick at the universityâs 88th annual commencement ceremony on Saturday, May 16, 2015. The degree conferred was Doctor of Science honoris causa.
âWe at CGU are thrilled that Patrick Ball accepted our Honorary Degree invitation and joined us for commencement,â said Thomas Horan, CGU Professor and Director, Center for Information Systems and Technology. âPatrickâs work stands as a model for conducting first-r...
Patrick Ball is kicking himself for a decision he made almost 25 years ago. âI was clever, but I wasnât smart,â 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 Iâm sitting in his office in San Franciscoâs 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 Salvadorâs internal armed conflict, the files detail ...
El objetivo de esta institución temporal es conocer la verdad de lo ocurrido en el marco del conflicto armado.
Benetech's Human Rights Data Analysis Group Publishes 2010 Analysis of Human Rights Violations in Five Countries
Analysis of Uncovered Government Data from Guatemala and Chad Clarifies History and Supports Criminal Prosecutions
By Ann Harrison
The past year of research by the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) has supported criminal prosecutions and uncovered the truth about political violence in Guatemala, Iran, Colombia, Chad and Liberia. On today's celebration of the 62nd anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, HRDAG invites the international community to engage scientifically defensible methodologies that ...
