675 results for search: %E3%80%8C%ED%98%84%EB%AA%85%ED%95%9C%20%ED%8F%B0%ED%8C%85%E3%80%8D%20O6O~5OO~%C6%BC469%20%2049%EC%82%B4%EB%82%A8%EC%84%B1%EC%84%B9%ED%8C%8C%EB%8D%B0%EC%9D%B4%ED%8C%85%2049%EC%82%B4%EB%82%A8%EC%84%B1%EC%84%B9%ED%8C%8C%EB%8F%99%EC%95%84%EB%A6%AC%E2%98%9C49%EC%82%B4%EB%82%A8%EC%84%B1%EC%84%B9%ED%8C%8C%EB%8F%99%ED%98%B8%ED%9A%8C%E2%96%9349%EC%82%B4%EB%82%A8%EC%84%B1%EC%84%B9%ED%8C%8C%EB%A7%8C%EB%82%A8%E2%93%A5%E3%82%89%E5%BF%A6hybridity/feed/content/colombia/privacy


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 ...

Coming soon: HRDAG 2019 Year-End Review

The online version of the 2019 Year-End Review will appear in January 2020.            

La misión de contar muertos


El Salvador 1991 – Who Did What To Whom?

Members of the Salvadoran military committed tens of thousands of killings during the country’s civil war which raged from the late 1970’s until 1990. While working for a peace organization in El Salvador in 1991, Patrick Ball was asked by a colleague at a human rights group to help organize a large collection of human rights testimonies. Trained as a social scientist, Ball created the “Who Did What To Whom” (WTWTW) model for examining human rights data. Ball used this system to create a structured, relational database of violations reported in more than 9,000 testimonies to the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission. To determine who was most ...

Primer to Inform Discussions about Bail Reform

The primer addresses what pretrial risk assessment is and what the research supports.

An Award for Anita Gohdes

On November 26, HRDAG colleague Anita Gohdes was awarded the German Dissertation Prize for the Social Sciences. The patron of the prize is the President of the German Parliament, Norbert Lammert, who presented Anita with the award. Anita’s dissertation, “Repression 2.0: The Internet in the War Arsenal of Modern Dictators,” investigates the role played by social media networks in modern dictatorships, such as President Assad’s regime in Syria. On one hand, Anita argues, social media can help opposition groups to organize more effectively, but on the other hand, the same networks allow regimes to monitor and manipulate the population. ...

Coders Bare Invasion Death Count


Celebrating our First Anniversary and Welcoming Our Newest Board Member

One year ago, HRDAG cast out on its own as an independent nonprofit—and this first year has been busy, productive, and exciting. We’re indebted to our Advisory Board for their valuable contributions and to our funders for their generosity and participation in our mission. Highlights of the past year include contributing testimony to three court cases, publishing two reports on conflict-casualties in Syria, presenting over a dozen talks (many of which are available on our talks page), traveling to over half a dozen countries to testify, collaborate with partners, and participate in conferences/workshops, hiring a new technical lead, and bringing in ...

Cuentas y mediciones de la criminalidad y de la violencia

Exploración y análisis de los datas para comprender la realidad. Patrick Ball y Michael Reed Hurtado. 2015. Forensis 16, no. 1 (July): 529-545. © 2015 Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal y Ciencias Forenses (República de Colombia).


Our Thoughts on the Violence in Charlottesville

This week, we join our friends and colleagues in feeling horrified by the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. As we have for the past 26 years, we stand with the victims of violence and support human rights and dignity for all. We spend our careers observing and documenting mass political violence across the world. The demands by the so-called “alt-right” to normalize racism and social exclusion are all too familiar to us. At HRDAG, our work is always guided by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). We reaffirm our commitment to these principles, in particular that the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and ...

Reflections: Pivotal Moments in Freetown

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 ...

Searching for Trends: Analyzing Patterns in Conflict Violence Data

Megan Price and Anita Gohdes (2014). Searching for Trends: Analyzing Patterns in Conflict Violence Data. Political Violence @ a Glance. © 2014 PV@G.


About HRDAG

We are non-partisan—we do not take sides in political or military conflicts, nor do we advocate any particular political party or government policy. However, we are not neutral: we are always in favor of human rights. We support the protections established in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and other international human rights treaties and instruments.

HRDAG and AHPN Launch Book Detailing Collaboration

Earlier this month, HRDAG and the Historic Archive of the National Police (AHPN) of Guatemala launched a book that represents a long-time collaboration between the two organizations. The book, “Una mirada al AHPN a partir de un studio de cuantitativo,” is, as the title states, a look at the Archive’s datasets via a quantitative study. Book authors are HRDAG executive director Megan Price and AHPN colleague Carolina López, with translations by Beatriz Vejarano. The book is available in Spanish and forthcoming in English. The book explains how HRDAG and the Archive worked together over a decade to gain insight into the police activities that ...

Using Machine Learning to Help Human Rights Investigators Sift Massive Datasets

How we built a model to search hundreds of thousands of text messages from the perpetrators of a human rights crime.

Reflections: A Love Letter to HRDAG

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.

Where Stats and Rights Thrive Together

Everyone I had the pleasure of interacting with enriched my summer in some way.

Counting the Unknown Victims of Political Violence: The Work of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group

Ann Harrison (2012). Counting the Unknown Victims of Political Violence: The Work of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, in Human Rights and Information Communications Technologies: Trends and Consequences of Use. © 2012 IGI Global. All rights reserved.


On ensuring a higher level of data quality when documenting human rights violations to support research into the origins and cause of human rights violations

Romesh Silva. “On ensuring a higher level of data quality when documenting human rights violations to support research into the origins and cause of human rights violations.” ASA Proceedings of the Joint Statistical Meetings, the International Biometric Society (ENAR and WNAR), the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the Statistical Society of Canada. August, 2002.


Collecting Sensitive Human Rights Data in the Field: A Case Study from Amritsar, India.

Romesh Silva and Jasmine Marwaha. “Collecting Sensitive Human Rights Data in the Field: A Case Study from Amritsar, India.” In JSM Proceedings, Social Statistics Section. Alexandria, VA. © 2011 American Statistical Association. All rights reserved.


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.

Donate