Replication Data for: Human Rights Violations in Space: Assessing the External Validity of Machine Geo-coded Vs. Human Geo-coded Data

This replication directory contains both R-code and data necessary to reproduce all models, figures, and tables included in \"Human Rights Violations in Space: Assessing the External Validity of Machine Geo-coded Vs. Human Geo-coded Data\" as well as its supplemental appendix. Political event data are widely used in studies of political violence. Recent years have seen notable advances in the automated coding of political event data from international news sources. Yet, the validity of machine coded event data remains disputed, especially in the context of event geolocation. We analyze the frequencies of human- and machine geo-coded event data agreement in relation to an independent (ground truth) source. The events are human rights violations in Colombia. We perform our evaluation for a key, eight year period of the Colombian conflict and in three two-year subperiods as well as for a selected set of (non)journalistically remote municipalities. As a complement to this analysis, we estimate spatial probit models based on the three datasets. These models assume Gaussian Markov Random Field (GMRF) error processes; they are constructed using a stochastic differential equation and estimated with integrated Laplacian approximation. The estimated models tell us whether the three datasets produce comparable predictions, underreport events in relation to the same covariates, and have similar patterns of prediction error. Together the two analyses show that, for this subnational conflict, the machine and human geocoded datasets are comparable in terms of external validity but, according to the geostatistical models, produce prediction errors that differ in important respects.