gdeltproject.orgThe GDELT Project

Blog Data Solutions Intro Watching Computing Downloading Blogging Starting Watching Our World Unfold Visualization credit GDELT Project. A Global Database of Society Supported by Google Jigsaw , the GDELT Project monitors the world’s broadcast, print, and web news from nearly every corner of every country in over 100 languages and identifies the people, locations, organizations, themes, sources, emotions, counts, quotes, images and events driving our global society every second of every day, creating a free open platform for computing on the entire world. is a realtime network diagram and database of global human society for open research Visualization credit GDELT Project. Watching The Entire World GDELT monitors the world’s news media from nearly every corner of every country in print, broadcast, and web formats, in over 100 languages, every moment of every day. What would it look like to use massive computing power to see the world through others’ eyes, to break down language and access barriers, facilitate conversation between societies, and empower local populations with the information and insights they need to live safe and productive lives? By quantitatively codifying human society’s events, dreams and fears, can we map happiness and conflict, provide insight to vulnerable populations and even potentially forecast global conflict in ways that allow us as a society to come together to deescalate tensions, counter extremism, and break down cultural barriers? That is the vision of the GDELT Project. Put simply, the GDELT Project is a realtime open data global graph over human society as seen through the eyes of the world’s news media, reaching deeply into local events, reaction, discourse, and emotions of the most remote corners of the world in near-realtime and making all of this available as an open data firehose to enable research over human society. Global Reach GDELT monitors print, broadcast, and web news media in over 100 languages from across every country in the world to keep continually updated on breaking developments anywhere on the planet . Its historical archives stretch back to January 1, 1979 and update every 15 minutes. Through its ability to leverage the world’s collective news media , GDELT moves beyond the focus of the Western media towards a far more global perspective on what’s happening and how the world is feeling about it . Emerging Media From the Global Twitter Heartbeat to the SyFy Opposite Worlds Show (and many more to be announced shortly) we are exploring how social media is used around the world and how people and societies express themselves and talk about the world online. As these projects increase our collective understanding of the social sphere and especially how it is used in the non-Western world , we will be increasingly integrating social media into GDELT’s monitoring streams. Historical Breadth In the words of George Santayana "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - history is highly cyclic and contemporary events are often deeply rooted in historical contexts , making the understanding of the past of critical importance to interpreting the present. Already GDELT is the first truly multi-decade global event database and through an array of collaborations and partnerships we are expanding GDELT’s coverage all the way back to the year 1800, which, when complete, will offer more than two centuries of codified global history. Translation Even the largest teams of human translators cannot read and translate every word published by the world’s news media each day. The GDELT Translingual platform represents what we believe is the largest realtime streaming news machine translation deployment in the world: all global news that GDELT monitors in 65 languages , representing 98.4% of its daily non-English monitoring volume, is translated in realtime into English and processed. " is an initiative to construct a catalog of human societal-scale behavior and beliefs across all countries of the world, connecting every person, organization, location, count, theme, news source, and event across the planet into a single massive network that captures what’s happening around the world, what its context is and who’s involved, and how the world is feeling about it, every single day." With support from the US Institute of Peace, the GDELT Global Conflict Dashboard provides a live interactive map of global protests and unrest around the world each day. Visualization credit GDELT Project. As part of the new GDELT Global Knowledge Graph 2.0 system, the Global Content Analysis Measures (GCAM) suite assesses over 2,200 emotions and themes from every article, allowing you to explore everything from anxiety to smugness to passivity to vanity. Visualization credit GDELT Project. Published the day before President Yanukovych fled the country, this map offers an interactive visualization of protests and violence against civilians in the country, showing both the spread of unrest at that point across the country, and the significant and growing restlessness of Crimea, foreshadowing its ultimate breakaway from the mainland. Visualization credit GDELT Project. Photo credit Google. Computing on The Entire World: Events & Networks GDELT uses some of the world’s most sophisticated natural language and data mining algorithms, including the world’s most powerful deep learning algorithms, to extract more than 300 categories of events, millions of themes and thousands of emotions and the networks that tie them together. Monitoring nearly the entire world’s news media is only the beginning - even the largest team of humans could not begin to read and analyze the billions upon billions of words and images published each day. GDELT uses some of the world’s most sophisticated computer algorithms, custom-designed for global news media, running on "one of the most powerful server networks in the known Universe" , together with some of the world’s most powerful deep learning algorithms , to create a realtime computable record of global society that can be visualized, analyzed, modeled, examined and even forecasted. A huge array of datasets totaling trillions of datapoints are available. Three primary data streams are created, one codifying physical activities around the world in over 300 categories, one recording the people, places, organizations, millions of themes and thousands of emotions underlying those events and their interconnections and one codifying the visual narratives of the world’s news imagery. All three streams update every 15 minutes, offering near-realtime insights into the world around us. Underlying the streams are a vast array of sources, from hundreds of thousands of global media outlets to special collections like 215 years of digitized books, 21 billion words of academic literature spanning 70 years, human rights archives and even saturation processing of the raw closed captioning stream of almost 100 television stations across the US in collaboration with the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive. Finally, also in collaboration with the Internet Archive, the Archive captures nearly all worldwide online news coverage monitored by GDELT each day into its permanent archive to ensure its availability for future generations even in the face of repressive forces that continue to erode press freedoms around the world. GDELT Event Database The GDELT Event Database records over 300 categories of physical activities around the world, from riots and protests to peace appeals and diplomatic exchanges, georeferenced to the city or mountaintop , across the entire planet dating back to January 1, 1979 and updated every 15 minutes. Essentially it takes a sentence like " The United States criticized Russia yesterday for deploying its troops in Crimea, in which a recent clash with its soldiers left 10 civilians injured " and transforms this blurb of unstructured text into three structured database entries,...