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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 ...

How We Choose Projects

For more than 20 years, HRDAG has been carving out a niche in the international human rights movement. We know what we’re good at and what we’re not qualified to do. We know what quantitative questions we think are important for the community, and we know what we like to do. These preferences guide us as we consider whether to take on a project. We’re scientists, so our priorities will come as no surprise. We like to stick to science (not ideology), avoid advocacy, answer quantifiable questions, and increase our scientific understanding. While we have no hard-and-fast rules about what projects to take on, we organize our deliberation ...

Get Involved/Donate

Donating to HRDAG Thank you for your interest in making a donation to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group to help us use science to support our partners in the human rights world. You can make a donation by credit card on the Community Partners® Network for Good page. HRDAG is a "project of Community Partners," and right below  the section on payment information, you'll be able to select "Human Rights Data Analysis Group" from a drop-down menu. (On most browsers, if you use this link, HRDAG will be pre-selected on the drop-down menu.) This transaction will appear on your credit card statement as "Network for Good." If you donate by check, ...

Measuring the Mortality Consequences of Armed Conflict in Amritsar, India: A New Approach to the Indirect Sampling of Conflict-Related Mortality

Romesh Silva and Jeff Klingner. “Measuring the Mortality Consequences of Armed Conflict in Amritsar, India: A New Approach to the Indirect Sampling of Conflict-Related Mortality.” Poster presented at the Population Association of America 2011 Annual Meeting. © 2011 Benetech. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


Welcoming our new Technical Lead

After almost two months of searching for the perfect fit, we’re very pleased to announce that Josh Shadlen has joined HRDAG as our new technical lead. Finding Josh was no easy feat. We were looking for what many people would call a “data scientist,” that is, someone with expertise in both computer science and statistics. These days, “data science” is one of the hottest fields out there. Bringing the perfect mix of academic depth and thoughtful reflection, Josh stood out for us. With prior jobs including gigs at Silicon Valley startups and Twitter, he’s got high-level (more…)

Our Copyright Policy

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 ...

Lies, Damned Lies and Official Statistics

This essay in the Health and Human Rights Journal addresses attempts to undermine Covid-19 data collection.

HRDAG and #GivingTuesday 2018

Will you help HRDAG advance human rights?

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 ...

A Universal Declaration of a Few Data Rights

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 ...

Partners

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 ...

Update on Work in Guatemala and the AHPN

HRDAG has sampled and analyzed documents at Guatemala's AHPN and has testified against war criminals based on that analysis.

Welcoming Our New Foundation Relations and Strategy Lead

On March 16, Kristen Yawitz joined the HRDAG team in the role of Foundation Relations and Strategy Lead.

Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission Data

In July 2009, The Human Rights Data Analysis Group concluded a three-year project with the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help clarify Liberia’s 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 “Descriptive Statistics From Statements to the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Liberian TRC data and the accompanying data dictionary anonymized-statgivers.csv contains information ...

Learning Day by Day: Quantitative Research at the AHPN

Working at the Historic Archive of the National Police (AHPN) of Guatemala, there are many skills I learned on the job. My many years of work on the team that studies the recovered documents have been like a custom-made course in how to do quantitative research. The Archive documents I study are the result of 36 years of creation during civil war (1960 to 1996). Many of these documents are simply administrative—but we are able to use them to understand patterns that occurred during the conflict, to get a sense of what mattered to the National Police and what didn’t. Our quantitative research shows us the Police behavior in broad strokes. ...

Counting Casualties in Syria

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 ...

Megan Price Elected Board Member of Tor Project

Today The Tor Project announced that it has elected a new Board of Directors, and among them is HRDAG executive director Megan Price. The Tor Project is a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes online privacy and provides software that helps users opt out of online tracking. Megan and Patrick have long maintained that encryption and privacy are essential for enabling human rights work. Patrick's ideas are described in Monday's FedScoop story about encryption, human rights, and the U.S. State Department. “Human rights groups depend on strong cryptography in order to hold governments accountable," says Patrick. "HRDAG depends on local human ...

Mortality in the DDS Prisons in Chad, 1985–1988

Patrick Ball (2014). Human Rights Data Analysis Group. August 22, 2014. © 2014 HRDAG. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


HRDAG and the Trial of José Efraín Ríos Montt

At some point in the next week, HRDAG's executive director, Patrick Ball, will be providing expert testimony in the trial of General José Efraín Ríos Montt, the de-facto president of Guatemala in 1982-1983. Gen. Ríos is being tried on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. (His military intelligence director, Gen. Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez is also on trial.) Patrick will testify on approximately April 15-18, 2013, and he may begin as early as this Friday, April 12. The trial opened on March 20, 2013, in the Supreme Court building in Guatemala City. According to an Open Society Justice Initiative blogpost covering the event, the ...

Colombia 2010-2012 – Advancing Methods to Count Deaths and Missing People

From 2010 to 2012, a series of reports by HRDAG researchers applied new statistical methodologies to investigate deaths and missing people in Colombia. A 2010 report released by HRDAG scientists Tamy Guberek, Daniel Guzmán, Megan Price, Kristian Lum, and Patrick Ball documented patterns of violence in the Colombian state of Casanare. HRDAG researchers used MSE to analyze killings and disappearances recorded in 15 datasets provided by judicial, government, security, forensic and civil society organizations. Matching cases that appeared in more than one dataset, HRDAG statisticians modeled the process by which violations were recorded and estimated the ...

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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