Conflict event datasets like UCDP/PRIO, ACLED, UMD-START and LiveUAMap have become popular in the last decade to serve as important sources of situational awareness in violent zones and migration events. These datasets comb through news, local sources and the Internet to log violent as well as non-violent critical event information to provide researchers and field operatives perspective and context as they muddle through the uncertainties of critical events. Major event datasets have also contributed heavily to the emergence of modern conflict, peacekeeping and migration studies and thus, newer research projects focus on how to create new, specialized event datasets, as well as how to integrate or improve existing ones. This talk connects the most recent advances in the field of conflict studies and seeks to bridge them with some of the emerging techniques in data science and social media data harvesting. The current progression of both conflict and social media research fields will likely result in a heavier reliance on jointly-produced event datasets in the next decade and it is crucial for researchers from both domains can come together to produce newer and better conflict and migration event datasets, potentially opening up a dedicated novel field of research.

Presenter: Dr. Akın Ünver, Associate Professor of International Relations, Kadir Has University

Moderator: Dr. Merih Angın, Director of MA-CSSL, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Koç University