Half a Billion Clicks Can’t Be Wrong
What big data tells us about next year’s crisis zones.
EXTRACTS:
….my 2011 “Culturomics 2.0” study demonstrated the unique insights gleaned from looking at how the media covers an event, rather than just what it covers.
The Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) project is the largest event database in the world, capturing over a quarter-billion events in every country, down to the city level — across 300 categories, from 1979 to the present, and with daily updates of 100,000 events a day.
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Of course, the best part is being able to dive in yourself, so without further ado, download the complete 172-page report and take a look at the countries you are most interested in or check out how they compare in the master ranking table at the end of the report. Take a look through what a big data view of 675 million mentions of conflict tell us about how the world is changing. When you're done, sign up for the new GDELT Daily Trends Report email and get a miniature version of this delivered to your inbox each morning. Big data is giving us our first glimpse of a world in which we can map the Earth's riots as well as we can its earthquakes and hurricanes — and all from just reading the news a little more carefully.
