Provided through the support of the United States Institute of Peace, this highly experimental prototype dashboard offers an overview of global protests (pink) and conflict (red) across the entire world, as monitored by the GDELT Project, combining a rolling animated map of the past 180 days (visualizing macro-level spatial patterns) with a clickable map of major events monitored over the past 24 hours, updated each morning by 6AM EST.
Protests refer to any gathering identified by the news media as a "protest" or "demonstration", while conflict events include military mobilizations, halting/reduction of aid or diplomatic relations, embargoes, boycotts and sanctions, coercion such as curfews and mass detaining, and physical attacks.
In a single map you are seeing an overview of major global activity, as captured by the world's news media and monitored by the GDELT Project. All protest and conflict events are grouped together by city/location. For the animated map layer, if a location has both protest and conflict events, it is colored by whichever there are more of. All dots on the animated map are the same size, regardless of number of events at that location, due to current limitations of the animation system. For the daily map layers, dots are displayed separately at each location for protests and conflict and are sized based on the total volume of coverage devoted to that type of event at that location. Thus, locations with more "important" events will be displayed using a larger dot to indicate major evolving situations.
Click on the "Visible Layers" dropdown at the top-right of the map to turn off the animated layer to see only those events occurring yesterday. You can click on any of these locations to view a popup displaying a few sample articles covering events at that location, as well as a link to Google News to display other coverage of that location. NOTE that the article selection algorithm attempts to pick the three "best" articles to capture the "overall" situation in a location, but is currently under heavy development and still makes many mistakes as it is being further refined. Usually the combination of those selected links and the Google News link will offer a useful overview of the major developments at a given location.
To minimize false positives and surface the most "important" events of the day, this map aggressively filters the GDELT Event Database using the GDELT Global Knowledge Graph, but still likely contains many errors due to the difficulities encountered when attempting to codify the entire world's news media each day. Over time we will be adding more event types and additional filtering options to make more of the GDELT Event Database available through this map interface.
We'd like to thank the United States Institute of Peace for making this map possible and Google Ideas for their support of the GDELT Project. Please get in touch with any suggestions or recommendations as we continue to improve this exciting new mapping platform!