… the point of today’s posting is the long, long awaited release of a public version of the Integrated Conflict Early Warning System (ICEWS) dataset, which appeared without fanfare on Dataverse late in the afternoon on Friday, 27 March, with Jay Ulfelder probably responsible for first spotting it.
This is a massive resource—the investment in the ICEWS project, albeit not all of this going into the data—probably roughly equalled the whole of NSF spending on all international relations and comparative politics research during the time it was active and as with any large data set it is going to take a while to figure out all of its quirks. The ever-resourceful David Masad already has some excellent instructions and initial analyses and visualizations here, and I’m sure more will be forthcoming in coming weeks—and years.