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Trips to and from Guatemala
HRDAG has been working with the Historic Archive of the National Police in Guatemala (hereafter, the Archive) for the past seven years. The Archive contains a treasure trove of data recorded and kept by the Guatemalan National Police over the past century. When the Archive was first discovered in 2005, researchers there immediately recognized both the value and fragility of the tens of millions of documents. As a result, they reached out to HRDAG, and we reached out to volunteers at Westat to devise a plan to estimate the contents of the entire Archive as quickly as possible in case the documents were destroyed or access to them was limited. ...
IN THE FACE OF TYRANNY
Taking a Stand as Data Scientists
As human rights data analysts, we center our moral understanding on the values of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We believe that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” as the Declaration’s preamble states. This is our guide, and these are our values. For thirty-five years, this has meant using our skills as statisticians and programmers to help other people in their campaigns for truth and justice.
When a doctor sees a sick or injured ...
Newsletters
2025
21 October, 2025 - HRDAG takes a stand against tyranny
9 October, 2025 - Unlocking unstructured data and getting it right
30 September, 2025 - Structural Zero 04: Pulling Back the Curtain on LLMs and Policing Data
23 September, 2025 - California’s Racial Justice Act and Police Records Access Project
24 August, 2025 - Structural Zero 03: Without Encryption, My Work Wouldn’t Be Possible
17 July, 2025 - Structural Zero 02: Scatter and keep working
3 June, 2025 - Structural Zero 01: Dictatorships create a lot of data
24 June, 2025 - Breaking through the noise with evidence
19 May, 2025 - Structural Zero 00: Introd...
Announcing New HRDAG Advisory Board Member
Cynthia Conti-Cook came on board in March, 2025.
The Great Lessons in Research at the Archive
Doing an investigation on the contents of the Archive brought with it three major lessons. The first big lesson was the constant movement (nothing was static), The second great lesson was that everything evolved (the changes were a constant). The third major lesson was to discover how two institutions can work together while geographically far apart.
The constant movement
As there were other processes being carried out at the Archive, everything was in constant movement. In other words, one day the documents were in X location and tomorrow they may be in location Y or dispersed in multiple locations. This made it impossible to know with certai...
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 ...
Happy Ada Lovelace Day!
As an organization that uses science to advocate for human rights, the goals and issues represented by Ada Lovelace Day are very near and dear to our hearts. Additionally, we are lucky to work with and be advised by some pretty kick-ass ladies in STEM (see our People page to learn more about these amazing women (and men)).
I brainstormed a list of women I could write about, as Finding Ada suggests we celebrate today by blogging about a STEM heroine. I considered Anita Borg (she has her own institute!), who advocated tirelessly for women in computer science. I thought about Sally Wyatt, keynote speaker and organizer of the fascinating workshop...
Claudia Carolina López Taks
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 ...
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Welcoming Our 2019 Human Rights Intern
Trina Reynolds-Tyler is HRDAG's 2019 Human Rights Intern.
HRDAG Names New Board Member Margot Gerritsen
Margot is a professor in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University, interested in computer simulation and mathematical analysis of engineering processes.
Kristian Lum in Bloomberg
The interview poses questions about Lum's focus on artificial intelligence and its impact on predictive policing and sentencing programs.
Stephen Fienberg 1942-2016
We are saddened by the passing of Steve Fienberg yesterday in Pittsburgh, at the age of 74. He is perhaps best known around the world for bringing statistics to science and public policy and was a beloved professor at Carnegie Mellon University. At HRDAG we are in awe of and grateful for the work Steve did formalizing multiple systems estimation. His work on that front blazed a trail and essentially enabled all of our most important analytical work at the intersection of human rights and statistical science.
If we are to reduce the amount of human violence in the world, the first task is to determine the scope of the violence, to know how much of ...
Reflections: A Meaningful Partnership between HRDAG and Benetech
I joined the Benetech Human Rights Program at essentially the same time that HRDAG did, coming to Benetech from years of analyzing data for large companies in the transportation, hospitality and retail industries. But the data that HRDAG dealt with was not like the data I was familiar with, and I was fascinated to learn about how they used the data to determine "who did what to whom." Although some of the methodologies were similar to what I had experience with in the for-profit sector, the goals and beneficiaries of the analyses were very different.
At Benetech, I was initially predominantly focused on product management for Martus, a free ...
Announcing New HRDAG Advisory Board Member
Elizabeth Eagen of the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University will expand the HRDAG advisory board.
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 ...
Update of Iraq and Syria Data in New Paper
This week The Statistical Journal of the IAOS published a new(ish) paper by Megan Price and Patrick Ball. The open-access paper, Selection bias and the statistical patterns of mortality in conflict, is a revisiting and updating of both the Iraq and Syria examples used in an earlier paper, Big Data, Selection Bias, and the Statistical Patterns of Mortality in Conflict, which was published last year inThe SAIS Review of International Affairs (JHU Press, 2014).
HRDAG believes that the concerns highlighted by these examples are important for a wide variety of audiences, including both the foreign policy readers reached by The SAIS Review and the ...
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 ...
Welcoming Our 2018 Data Science Fellow
Shemika Lamare has joined the HRDAG team as our new data science fellow.
Connect with HRDAG
If you’d like to stay informed about HRDAG events, blogposts, and news, connect with us on Twitter, Facebook or through our RSS feed. We also have a LinkedIn page.
You may contact us directly via email at info @ hrdag.org.
A note for persons in search of assistance with specific human rights cases: We are very sorry for your troubles and your suffering; however, HRDAG does not take on casework. If you need help with a human rights case, you might consider requesting it from the International Committee of the Red Cross (www.icrc.org).
Photo: U.S. National Archives