Associated with the Center for Law and Social Sciences Fellowship (2019-2022)
Roles Within Project
Project Manager
Database Manager
Lead Coder
Research Assistant
Teacher's Assistant
2020- 2022 (Current)
2019- 2022 (Current)
2019-2020
2019
2020-2022
Oversaw the day-to-day activities of up to 10 research assistants at a time
Managed database of 5,000+ entries, checking for intercoder reliability
Facilitated codebook development and operationalization of political violence
Taught 8+ courses of 1-10 students in natural language processing & text-as-data
Project Description:
Internment, Torture and Pro-government Militia in Northern Ireland
How do liberal democracies justify policies that violate the rights of targeted subsets of their citizenry? When facing national security emergencies (real or imagined) which threaten a state's sovereignty or national narratives, government officials in countries throughout the world exempt themselves from maintaining certain rights-based protections and selectively surrender their commitments to democratic legal processes. States target select racial, religious, or ethnic groups—often construed as foreigners who threaten existing laws or institutions — with extrajudicial surveillance, internment without trial, or torture. In democracies with liberal constitutions, such repressive state policies directly violate basic constitutional guarantees to liberty, equal protection, and due process. Understanding how these rights protections are eroded is of central importance to this political moment.
This project sheds light on these dynamics through systematically analyzing the British Prime Ministers’ recently declassified security-related correspondence files, which document the lead up to, as well as the internal discussions and decisions about, Northern Ireland’s use of internment without trial between 1971 and 1973, using a combination of qualitative process tracing and Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods.
This project has spawned two sub-analysis: First, we seek to evaluate the British Government’s treatment of pro-government militia to aid in understanding how the state considers and constructs different classes of citizenship. Second, we are building a micro-level event dataset (every 72 hours) of pro-government, state and republican violence during the first four years of the Troubles.
This project is funded by National Science Foundation Law and Social Science Award #1823547 - “Civil Rights Violations and the Democratic Rule of Law,” (Emily K. Gade, Principal Investigator, with co-PIs Michael McCann and Noah Smith, 2018-2020).
Description borrowed from Emory Oppression Resistance Lab
Related Papers
I am working on two working papers related to this project.
1. “Micro-event Data from the Troubles in Northern Ireland." Working event dataset drawn from internal British Military reports produced for the Prime Minister every 72 hours during the first four years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Aim to be completed by Dec 2022.
2. "Re-evalauting Kappa Scores: New Intercoder Reliability Metrics in Text-as-Data"
1. “Micro-event Data from the Troubles in Northern Ireland." Working event dataset drawn from internal British Military reports produced for the Prime Minister every 72 hours during the first four years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Aim to be completed by Dec 2022.
2. "Re-evalauting Kappa Scores: New Intercoder Reliability Metrics in Text-as-Data"
Reflection
I played a critical role in the development of the codebook and shaping of the database for this project, as well as in the training of the coders and publication of the dataset related to this project.
