Diana Partridge’s research while affiliated with University of Maryland, College Park and other places

How do international crises unfold? We conceptualize international relations as a strategic chess game between adversaries and develop a systematic way to measure pieces, moves, and gambits accurately and consistently over a hundred years of history. We introduce a new ontology and dataset of international events called ICBe based on a very high-quality corpus of narratives from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project. We demonstrate that ICBe has higher coverage, recall, and precision than existing state of the art datasets and conduct two detailed case studies of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and the Crimea-Donbas Crisis (2014). We further introduce two new event visualizations (event iconography and crisis maps), an automated benchmark for measuring event recall using natural language processing (synthetic narratives), and an ontology reconstruction task for objectively measuring event precision. We make the data, supplementary appendix, replication material, and visualizations of every historical episode available at a companion website crisisevents.org.

How do international crises unfold? We conceive of international affairs as a strategic chess game between adversaries, necessitating a systematic way to measure pieces, moves, and gambits accurately and consistently over different contexts and periods. We develop such a measurement strategy with an ontology of crisis actions and interactions and apply it to a high-quality corpus of crisis narratives recorded by the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project. We demonstrate that the ontology has high coverage over most of the thoughts, speech, and actions contained in these narratives and produces high inter-coder agreement when applied by human coders. We introduce a new crisis event dataset ICB Events (ICBe). We find that ICBe captures the process of a crisis with greater accuracy and granularity than other well-regarded events or crisis datasets. We make the data, replication material, and additional visualizations available at a companion website www.crisisevents.org.