[liberationtech] News-based egyptian protest dashboard pilot using gdelt

[Yosem Companys]

From: kalev leetaru <kalev.leetaru5 at gmail.com>

Hi everyone, thought many of you might find of interest this pilot "protest
dashboard" John Beieler at PSU created using our GDELT event archive (
http://gdelt.utdallas.edu/) of protest, violence, and force posture change
events in Egypt over the past week derived from global English-language
news media coverage:

http://gdeltblog.wordpress.com/2013/08/19/week-of-egyptian-protests/

This is a very early pilot prototype to explore how we might present the
data in a way that is useful for humanitarian responders and the general
public to better understand these kinds of fast-moving fluid situations
that cover a wide geographic area.  You can interactively zoom into the map
and click on a point to see a list of URLs containing protest events from
that location.  The pink dots represent areas with protests, while the red
semi-transparent circles indicate areas with violence.  You can turn the
two layers on/off using the drop-down in the upper-right of the map.

John also created two previous maps of global protests, one for all
protests in 2013 in GDELT thus far:

http://gdeltblog.wordpress.com/2013/08/05/mapping-protest-data/

and an animated one that shows all global protests 1979-present in GDELT
(this one reflects the exponential rise in available global news media
coverage over the last quarter-century):

http://gdeltblog.wordpress.com/2013/08/01/animated-protest-mapping/
http://johnbeieler.org/protest_mapping

The geographers on the list may find these next two studies of interest,
looking at how the resolution of the GNS and GNIS gazeteers affects the
ability to precisely place events and how much that varies by locality:

http://gdeltblog.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/93/

And this comparison of GDELT and the NASA Night Lights imagery and the
reach of global English-language mainstream media:

http://gdeltblog.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/visualizing-global-gdelt-coverage/

We'd love any feedback you might have on the pilot Egyptian protests
dashboard as we start exploring how we might create some visualizations and
interfaces to allow the data to be more easily utilized by the humanitarian
community, so email me directly at kalev.leetaru5 at gmail.com with any
suggestions/comments/thoughts/etc.

Also, if anyone on this list has suggestions for other large global
collections of placenames (ie global gazeteers) that include centroid
coordinates for each location, that are more extensive than GNS, GNIS, and
geonames.org, we'd love to hear about them!  Especially gazeteers that
include more local names and regional name variants.

~Kalev
Georgetown University
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