GDELT

Timeline

Show & Tell 20 minutes
Hackathon 90 minutes
Presentation 30 minutes
Project 10 minutes
Total 150 minutes

Dataset

Obtain the relevant time period data from the GDELT raw data site.

Repository

https://github.com/CSCI-4830-002-2014/hackathon-gdelt

Objectives

  1. Pick a public policy/international relations change as a team from the suggested list for analysis
  2. Analyze the impact of that public policy change

Prerequisites

Team

Form a team of four or five with other classmates. You should work with others who are already sitting at the same table. The teaching staff will walk around to facilitate team forming. Introduce yourself if you do not already know each other.

Objective 1

As a team, pick one of the following public policy changes to focus on. If you have an idea for another topic, check with the instructors first.

  • Criminalization of homelessness - note that this doesn’t have a specific date change as this is more of a general trend, so a wider date range would need to be reviewed
  • US military & medical support for Ebola outbreak - announcement made September 16th, keep in mind that there have been several smaller outbreaks in the past

Objective 2

Pick the applicable data timeframe, download, merge the data, and import into Tableau for analysis.

Analysis Questions

  1. Do you see an increase or decrease in related events? Is that good or bad? (Hint: line or bar chart)
  2. What actors are involved in these events? Can you infer anything based on who’s involved in the event? (Hint: heat map)
  3. How were you able to use the georeferencing fields in your analysis? (Hint: map)
  4. Were you able to get insight from the source URLs? If so how? (Hint: bar chart and a calculated field)

Discussion Questions

  1. Did you run into any limitations with the Goldstein ranking score? What are they?
  2. What other data sets could you add to your analysis to be more effective?

Deliverables

  • A brief description of what you found
  • Your team’s hypothesis on the public policy change
  • Supporting charts and graphs

Presentation

Your team will do a 3-5 minute presentation to the entire class about your findings.

Submission

Use a Github repository to submit your work. Follow this link to find the template repository for this hackathon. Fork, modify, commit, push, and make a pull request.