MPEDS: Machine-learning Protest Event Data System
MPEDS is a tool for facilitating the creation of protest event data. MPEDS uses recent innovations from machine learning and natural language processing to generate protest event data with little to no human intervention. The system aims to have the effect of increasing the speed and reducing the labor costs associated with identifying and coding collective action events in news sources, thus increasing the timeliness of protest data and reducing biases due to excessive reliance on too few news sources.
Publications
- MPEDS: Automating the Generation of Protest Event Data. 2017. SocArXiv
- Black Protest in US News Wire Stories 1994-2010: Voices From the Doldrums. (with Pamela Oliver and Chaeyoon Lim) SocArVix
Acknowledgments
Development of this software has been supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and National Science Foundation grant SES-1423784. Thanks to Emanuel Ubert and Katie Fallon for working with this system since its inception, and to many undergraduate annotators who have put a lot of time working with and refining this system.