Achievement

A massive new data set of 200-million geocoded events from 1979-present was developed by Kalev Leetaru of the University of Illinois in collaboration with BDSS-IGERT senior faculty Philip Schrodt and others. The first event held under the IGERT Competitive Challenge mechanism was a hackathon with the GDELT data, involving IGERT trainees, associates, and affiliates, and other students from political science, geography, information sciences, and others.

Many of the visualizations and tools developed at the hackathon (http://bdss.psu.edu/news.html) have been developed into scientific papers, presentations, software tools, and improvements in the data themselves.

The release of GDELT has resulted in substantial discussion in the media and in policy and scientific blogospheres, citing the work of IGERT Affiliate Jay Yonamine, IGERT Trainees Josh Stevens, and (future) IGERT Trainee John Beieler (http://eventdata.psu.edu/data.dir/GDELT.html).