Author: William Kennedy

GDELT: Event Data Meets Big Data, and How We Can Use It

David Masad, PhD Student
Computational Social Science Department
George Mason University

DATE: Monday, September 23, 2013
TIME: 4:00 p.m.
LOCATION: Lecture Room (Room 229)
Krasnow Institute Building
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

ABSTRACT:
The Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT) is a new
dataset of detailed, politically-relevant events from around the world,
updated daily and freely available — over 250 million events, from 1979
to yesterday. It offers new opportunities to find spatial and temporal
patterns and trends in international events, develop new theories and
models, and even build and test forecasts of future events. As the
largest dataset of its kind, it also introduces new challenges, and
invites the application of tools from other fields and across disciplines.

This presentation will provide an introduction to GDELT and some of the
work that has already been done with it. It will touch on the history of
event data and on GDELT’s machine-coding approach (and how it compares
to human coding); it will describe some of the research that has already
utilized GDELT, and the strengths and weaknesses of the data that the
research community is discovering. Finally, it will discuss the future
of GDELT research, and invite questions and interdisciplinary discussion.

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** Parking Note: The former meter/pay-station lot across Shenandoah
River Lane has been converted to a loading/unloading zone and can no
longer serve for Monday seminar visitor parking. Visitors should park
in one of the campus decks.

The CSS seminar speaker for Friday, September 20 will be Heath Henderson, research fellow in the Office of Strategic Planning and Development Effectiveness at the Inter-American Development Bank.  Dr. Heath’s talk, entitled “Nicaragua, the Food Crisis, and the Future of Smallholder Agriculture” (abstract below), is scheduled to begin at 3:00pm in the Center for Social Complexity Suite located on the 3rd floor of Research Hall.  The talk will be followed by a Q&A session along with light refreshments.

Dr. Henderson holds a PhD in economics and an MA in international politics from American University in Washington, DC. His dissertation, titled “Nicaragua, the Food Crisis, and the Future of Smallholder Agriculture,” examined equity-efficiency tradeoffs in the distribution of agricultural landholdings in developing countries by focusing on the case of Nicaragua. Generally speaking, his research interests include agent-based modeling, agricultural development, and applied econometrics.

Abstract:    Empirical studies of agrarian production in developing countries find that smallholders possess a productivity advantage over large farms. Eswaran and Kotwal (1986) famously derive this inverse farm size-productivity relationship from the structure of agrarian production. Their model predicts that in otherwise equivalent economies a more egalitarian land distribution raises output and producer welfare. However, developing countries have recently experienced the rapid emergence of modern value chains. Recent research provides evidence that this transformation alters the welfare possibilities of agrarian economies. We therefore extend the Eswaran-Kotwal model by incorporating a modern value chain. Our results contradict previous sanguine conclusions about egalitarian distributions of the means of production. We observe a potential equity/efficiency tradeoff in the distribution of land.

Please visit www.css.gmu.edu to see list of upcoming seminar speakers.