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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 ...
El Salvador
Some of the earliest large-scale human rights information projects happened in El Salvador. One was developed by Patrick Ball at the Salvadoran non-governmental Human Rights Commission, also known as Comision de Derechos Humanos de El Salvador (CDHES-ng). Between 1977 and 1990, more than 9,000 testimonies were taken in an effort to document the nature and scope of the bloody conflict between the army and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). Starting in 1991, Patrick worked with CDHES staff to organize the information in an early computer database. They linked reported human rights violations with the career structures of individual ...
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 ...
HRDAG Retreat 2016
What do you get when you bring seven statisticians, one quantitative political scientist, a writer, a computer scientist, and an administrator together for four days in a vacation rental on California’s Russian River? A lot of code, a technical paper and book chapter revised, another paper started, a great hike in the Redwoods, descriptions of food poisoning and crash landings in war zones, and a lot of talk about feelings.
Did I mention feelings? On the first evening of the annual retreat of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, executive director Megan Price asked us to go around the room and share how we were feeling on arrival. The request ...
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. ...
Estimating the Number of SARS-CoV-2 Infections and the Impact of Mitigation Policies
This Harvard Data Science Review article uses the least unreliable source of pandemic data: reported deaths.
HRDAG Names New Board Member William Isaac
William Isaac joins HRDAG's Advisory Board, bringing expertise in fairness and artificial intelligence.
Patrick Ball Honored as New ASA Fellow
We’re very happy to announce that our executive director, Patrick Ball, has been elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), as announced by ASA President Nathaniel Schenker. Patrick is one of 63 new ASA Fellows to be honored this year in a ceremony at the Joint Statistical Meetings, which will take place this August 5 in Boston, Massachusetts. (more…)
Patrick Ball Honored with Degree at Claremont Graduate University
We’re 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 university’s 88th annual commencement ceremony on Saturday, May 16, 2015. The degree conferred was Doctor of Science honoris causa.
“We at CGU are thrilled that Patrick Ball accepted our Honorary Degree invitation and joined us for commencement,” said Thomas Horan, CGU Professor and Director, Center for Information Systems and Technology. “Patrick’s work stands as a model for conducting first-r...
Tchad – Reportage Photo
[English]
Hissène Habré fût le Président de l’ancienne colonie française du Tchad de 1982 à 1990. De nombreuses allégations crédibles de torture systématique et de crimes contre l’humanité ont été faites contre la Direction de Documentation et de Sécurité (DDS), les forces de l’ordre responsables pour la persécution d’adversaires du régime Habré qui étaient aussi responsables pour l’administration de nombreuses prisons durant ce régime.
“La Piscine” est une ancienne piscine qui a été couverte par un toit en béton. Il est allégué qu’il s’agissait là d’une des prisons de la DDS dans laquelle de nombreux ...
Syria
On the heels of the Arab Spring revolutions, which began in December 2010, armed conflicts began in Syria in March 2011. What started as protests demanding that President Bashar al-Assad resign resulted in the deployment of the Syrian Army to stop the uprising. Since then, violent conflict has been raging in Syria. Amid this continuing violence and humanitarian crisis, local human rights activists and citizen journalists risk their lives to document human rights violations. The grave challenges they face are compounded by the regime's active suppression of information flow out of the country. As a result, there is considerable uncertainty about the ...
HRDAG’s Year in Review: 2022
This past year at HRDAG has been about continuing efforts to uncover the truth.
Speaking Truth to Power in Chad
Our hearty congratulations to our partners at Human Rights Watch (HRW), Association des Victimes des Crimes du Régime de Hissène Habré (AVCRP), Association Tchadienne pour la Promotion et la Défense des Droits de l’Homme (PDDH), and the Fédération Internationale des ligues des Droits de l’Homme (FIDH) on today's launch of "La Plaine des mortes: Le Tchad des Hissène Habré, 1982-1990." This book chronicles the alleged human rights abuses of Hissène Habré, the president of Chad between 1982 and 1990. It is the culmination of more than 13 years of investigations, documentation and research focused on uncovering the nature of political ...
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 ...
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 ...
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.
Data and Social Good: Using Data Science to Improve Lives, Fight Injustice, and Support Democracy
In this free, downloadable report, Mike Barlow of O’Reilly Media cites several examples of how data and the work of data scientists have made a measurable impact on organizations such as DataKind, a group that connects socially minded data scientists with organizations working to address critical humanitarian issues. HRDAG—and executive director Megan Price—is one of the first organizations whose work is mentioned.
Updated Casualty Count for Syria
Today the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released an HRDAG-prepared report that describes and tallies documented killings in the Syrian Arab Republic from the beginning of the conflict in March 2011 through April 2014. (The report is here.) This is our third report for the UN on the Syrian conflict, and it is an update of work we published in January 2013 and June 2013.
The report, Updated Statistical Analysis of Documentation of Killings in the Syrian Arab Republic, concludes that approximately 191,000 identifiable victims have been reported in the period covered (March 2011 – April 2014). (more…)