June 9, 15.00–16.00
Room: Europa
Chaired by
Kyle Marquardt
Professor
University of Bergen
Presenter
Paul Bederke
Researcher, Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (GESIS)
Title
Above and Beyond: Expanding the Party Facts Infrastructure
Presenter
Melina Liethmann
Data Manager, University of Gothenburg/Demscore
Co-Authors
Lisa Gastaldi, University of Gothenburg
Staffan I Lindberg, University of Gothenburg
Steven Wilson, Brandeis University
Title
DEMSCORE: One Infrastructure to Merge Them All
The potential of the ever-growing availability of open source data is accompanied by the challenge of its diversity: interdisciplinary data requires data linkage through harmonization, integration, and merging. The DEMSCORE research infrastructure has been engineered to enable universal linkage of varying types of data from diverse sources, collected for different kinds of units, stored in various formats, and conceptualized in multiple ways. Traditionally, this process is notorious for being, at best, time-consuming and complex and, at worst, prone to errors that can lead to flawed results. We solve this challenge by introducing a newly constructed infrastructure built on a generalized framework for conceptualizing the data linkage problem, presenting a universal and scalable solution, i.e., one that can be relatively effortlessly extended to additional datasets of almost any type.
This paper pursues two main goals: 1) describe DEMSCORE’s innovative contributions to deterministic data linkage, and 2) emphasize both the limitations and opportunities for future contributions of the DEMSCORE infrastructure to the field of data linkage.
Presenter
Magnus Öberg
Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor, Uppsala University
Co-Authors
Mert Can Yilmaz, Uppsala University
Title
Measurement Issues in Conflict Event Data
Clionadh Raleigh, Roudabeh Kishi, and Andrew Linke recently compared their own Armed Conflict Location and Events Dataset (ACLED) to three other conflict event datasets in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications. The authors claim to evaluate the validity and reliability of the four different conflict event datasets, but their evaluation is based on an incorrect premise and mired by misrepresentations, factual errors and significant omissions. In this article we investigate their claims about what drives differences between the two researcher led projects the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) and ACLED. In the process we address some general issues that arise in event data collection, including the importance of stable definitions, how demands on sourcing varies with the type of data collected, and how strategies for dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity impact the data. Contrary to the claims made in the target article, the differences between ACLED and UCDP in the cases put forth by the authors are not primarily due to differences in sourcing or inclusion thresholds. Analyzing the same cases, we show that most of the differences are due to auxiliary coding rules, standards for source evaluation and misrepresentations of UCDP data in the original article.
Demscore Conference 2025