We recently learned about an article by Dr Nafeez Ahmed that criticizes the methods and conclusions of the Iraq Body Count (IBC) and the work of Professor Michael Spagat. Dr Ahmed cites our work extensively in support of his arguments, so we think it’s useful for us to reply.
We welcome Dr Ahmed’s summary of various points of scientific debate about mortality due to violence, specifically in Iraq and Colombia. We think these are very important questions for the analysis of data about violent conflict, and indeed, about data analysis more generally. We appreciate his exploration of the technical nuances of this difficult field.
Unfortunately, ...
2025
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: Introducing Structural Zero
20 March, 2025 - Focus on HRDAG’s US-based projects
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HRDAG’s core values all have a connection to Scott Weikart, 1951–2023.
Kilómetro Cero is making a comparison of police killings in Puerto Rico and police killings in the non-territorial United States, and HRDAG is helping to organize the data.
HRDAG’s funding comes from private, international donors: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Open Society Foundations, an anonymous U.S.-based private foundation, Ford Foundation, The National Endowment for Democracy and individual donors. This funding supports both specific projects, as well as our scientific work generally in human rights data analysis.
For the entirety of its existence, HRDAG has been a project of non-profit organizations, first at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and then at Benetech, a non-profit Silicon Valley technology company. In February 2013, HRDAG became ...
I have made it my personal objective to amplify HRDAG's message of being extra careful and scientifically rigorous with human rights data.
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 ...
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
The primer addresses what pretrial risk assessment is and what the research supports.
It could make sense to use Rust as a data journalist for in-browser computations, and other thoughts from RustConf.
We aim to produce code that is clear, replicatable across machines and operating systems, and that leaves an easy-to-follow audit trail.
The modular nature of the workflow and use of Git allowed us to work on different parts of the project from across the country.
Herb led and mentored a generation of statisticians working in human rights.
Wilkerson was speaking at the inaugural Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, a gathering of academics and policymakers working to make the algorithms that govern growing swaths of our lives more just. The woman who’d invited him there was Kristian Lum, the 34-year-old lead statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, a San Francisco-based non-profit that has spent more than two decades applying advanced statistical models to expose human rights violations around the world. For the past three years, Lum has deployed those methods to tackle an issue closer to home: the growing use of machine learning tools in America’s criminal justice system.
Amelia Hoover Green. In Collective Violence and International Criminal Justice: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Alette Smeulers, Antwerp, Belgium. © 2010 Intersentia. All rights reserved. [Link coming soon]
HRDAG assisted the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission in building a systematic data coding system, electronic database, and secure data analysis process to manage the thousands of statements given to them in the course of their work. HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball and HRDAG field consultant Richard Conibere worked at the TRC full-time for approximately eighteen months starting in March 2003.
HRDAG worked with TRC researchers to help them incorporate quantitative findings to support the qualitative findings in their writing for the other chapters of the TRC report. In addition, HRDAG produced a Statistical Appendix to present ...