TY - JOUR
T1 - Diplomatic documents data for international relations
T2 - the Freedom of Information Archive Database
AU - Connelly, Matthew J.
AU - Hicks, Raymond
AU - Jervis, Robert
AU - Spirling, Arthur
AU - Suong, Clara H.
N1 - Funding Information:
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: grants from the National Science Foundation supported this work (Award Numbers 1637108 and 1637159). Matt Connelly and Raymond Hicks were also supported by Arcadia Grant 4082.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2020.
PY - 2021/11
Y1 - 2021/11
N2 - We introduce the Freedom of Information Archive (FOIArchive) Database, a collection of over 3 million documents about state diplomacy. Substantively, our database focusses on the USA and provides opportunities to analyze previously classified (or publicly unavailable) corpora of internal government documents which include the raw—often full—text of those documents. We also provide within-country diplomatic records for the USA, UK, and Brazil. The full span of the data is 1620–2013, but it is mainly from the twentieth century. Our database allows scholars to view text and associated statistics online and to download and view customized datasets via an application programming interface. We provide extensive metadata about the documents, including the countries and persons they mention, and their topics and classification levels. The metadata includes information we extracted with domain-specific, customized natural language processing tools. To demonstrate the potential of this data, we use it to design and validate a new index for “country importance” in the context of US foreign policy priorities.
AB - We introduce the Freedom of Information Archive (FOIArchive) Database, a collection of over 3 million documents about state diplomacy. Substantively, our database focusses on the USA and provides opportunities to analyze previously classified (or publicly unavailable) corpora of internal government documents which include the raw—often full—text of those documents. We also provide within-country diplomatic records for the USA, UK, and Brazil. The full span of the data is 1620–2013, but it is mainly from the twentieth century. Our database allows scholars to view text and associated statistics online and to download and view customized datasets via an application programming interface. We provide extensive metadata about the documents, including the countries and persons they mention, and their topics and classification levels. The metadata includes information we extracted with domain-specific, customized natural language processing tools. To demonstrate the potential of this data, we use it to design and validate a new index for “country importance” in the context of US foreign policy priorities.
KW - Diplomacy
KW - US foreign policy
KW - diplomatic communication
KW - historical documents
KW - text-as-data
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U2 - 10.1177/0738894220930326
DO - 10.1177/0738894220930326
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85087289963
SN - 0738-8942
VL - 38
SP - 762
EP - 781
JO - Conflict Management and Peace Science
JF - Conflict Management and Peace Science
IS - 6
ER -