A Very Short Introduction to Event Data Analysis

The Kansas Event Data System (KEDS) is a Macintosh program for the machine coding of international event data using pattern recognition and simple grammatical parsing. It is designed to work with short news articles such as those found in wire service reports or chronologies. To date, KEDS has primarily been used to code WEIS events from Reuters wire service lead sentences but in principle it can be used for other event coding schemes.

KEDS will work with any input text containing a series of records in the following format

[date]
[any other information]
[source text line 1]
[source text line 2]
...
[source text line n]
[blank line]

Source lines should be a maximum of 80 characters in length and the last character in each line should be blank. The source text is presently limited to 16 eighty-character lines containing a maximum of 1024 words. All characters are converted to upper- case and punctuation, except for commas, is eliminated.

We have been working with Reuters news service leads downloaded from the NEXIS data service. We have used an assortment of simple filter programs to remove all of the irrelevant information, and format the text for use with KEDS; the source code for these programs is available elsewhere at this site.

Click here to go to a more detailed introduction on using the KEDS coding system

Click here to go to a detailed history of the KEDS project