Cline Center for Advanced Social Research

01/09/2025

Want to see more updates on research, events, and collaborations? Our LinkedIn page is the place to go! Whether you’re a student interested in data analysis, a researcher passionate about creating tools for human flourishing, or just a friend of the Cline Center, LinkedIn is where we will be sharing our updates.

Find us here:

Cline Center for Advanced Social Research | 347 followers on LinkedIn. Transforming information into knowledge that advances human flourishing. | The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign equips and empowe...

09/10/2024

Cline Center director Scott Althaus recently co-authored *Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Ex*****on, and Impact in the Modern Era*, with support from the Cline Center. The book tackles Electoral College strategies using data from internal campaign records and novel data sources covering every presidential election from 1952 through 2020. With extensive research and data, *Battleground* provides a thorough overview of what history shows about modern-day elections.

Cline Center staff members Joe Bajjalieh and Loretta Auvil built a repository of over 5,000 documents for Director Althaus and his co-authors to utilize in order to reconstruct the campaign strategies and assess advertising buys in every state in the timespan of 40 years. Also, this book tracks the public appearance by every major party presidential and vice-presidential candidate from 1952 through 2020.

At the Cline Center, we collect and analyze data that can be used to educate, advocate, and create impact. We are delighted to have played a role in the publication in such a timely book.
You can find Director Althaus’ book here:

Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Ex*****on, and Impact in the Modern Era

08/22/2024

The Cline Center is pleased to announce the 2024-2025 David F. Linowes Faculty Fellows: Assistant Professor JungHwan Yang of University of Illinois Department of Communication and Associate Professor Yun Huang of the School of Information Sciences at Illinois.

Linowes Fellowships support scholars whose work is relevant to Cline Center initiatives and plan to use Cline Center data and technology in innovative projects.

Professor Yang is continuing his 2023-24 project by researching the media's coverage patterns of real-world events by identifying specific mass shooting incidents as they appear in the media through the Cline Center’s Global News Index. This study seeks to illuminate any inherent biases in news production, specifically by examining the criteria determining news selection and presentation. This process employs human-in-the-loop generative AI methods to identify distinct shooting events and correlate them with their corresponding media reports.

Professor Huang’s project focuses on enhancing the interpretation of police use of force data created by the Cline Center’s SPOTLITE project. She will investigate design improvements for the SPOTLITE dashboard to facilitate better understanding for various stakeholders, including the general public, journalists, law enforcement agencies, and educators. This project will employ effective interaction designs for SPOTLITE, with the goals of enhancing public understanding and trust while promoting transparency and accountability in law enforcement.

You can learn more about their projects and the Linowes Fellowship here: https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/get-involved/LinowesFellows

04/18/2024

We are pleased to announce the Cline Center’s 2024 Schroeder Summer Fellowships. Congrats to Ekin Alpay, Alesha Lewis, and Myung Jung Kim! To read about their interesting projects visit: https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/get-involved/SchroederFellows

03/21/2024

On Wednesday, March 27, University of Chicago economist and political scientist Christopher Blattman will be on campus to present the 2024 Linowes Lecture on how the organizational structure of criminal gangs in Medellin, Colombia influences rates of violence in the city, with lessons that apply to cities across the United States and the world as well as relevance for policymaking.

This in-person-only event will take place from 3:30-5:00pm in 160 English Building. All are welcome to attend! For more information go to: https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/news-and-events/events/linowes-lectures

12/05/2023

The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research in partnership with an interdisciplinary team of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty and student researchers has just released the most authoritative registry to date of police uses of lethal force in the United States from 2014 to 2021. The SPOTLITE project includes any incident where police use firearms—including those with non-fatal outcomes—as well as any other use of force that results in a death. The SPOTLITE dashboard (spotlite.illinois.edu) lets anyone explore past uses of lethal force by police for every county in the United States. For more background on the project, see the University’s press release on our project: https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/2081492979

The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research and an interdisciplinary team of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign experts have developed a nationwide registry on the use of lethal force by police officers in the U.S., identifying more than 23,000 incidents between 2014-2021.

10/20/2023

The 2023 Richard G. & Carole J. Cline Symposium will take place on Thursday October 26 and will include a Zoom Roundtable on the topic of reducing gun violence in the US with national experts Vaughn Bryant, Kimberley Smith, and Thomas Abt. This event is from 2:30-4:15 pm and is open to the public.

For more information about the event and to RSVP for the Zoom Roundtable go here: https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/news-and-events/events/cline-symposium

08/29/2023

The Cline Center is pleased to announce the 2023-2024 David F. Linowes Faculty Fellows: Assistant Professors Nora Webb Williams and JungHwan Yang of University of Illinois Department of Political Science and University of Illinois Department of Communication respectively.

Linowes Fellowships support scholars whose work is relevant to Cline Center initiatives and plan to use Cline Center data and technology in innovative projects.

Prof. Webb Williams is extending her 2022-23 project by continuing to use Cline Center news archives, databases, and text-as-data expertise to study the ties between elite actors in authoritarian regimes. The main focus is on post-Soviet countries, primarily Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus. The project will extract instances of positive and negative interactions between elites to predict regime-level outcomes such as coup d'état attempts. The work will involve developing new text-as-data tools and applying them to historical media coverage available at the Cline Center.

Prof. Yang’s research project aims to understand the media's coverage patterns of real-world events, with a primary focus on mass shootings and police shootings. There is a notable trend in media where only a handful of events receive predominant coverage, leaving numerous others underrepresented or completely ignored. This study seeks to illuminate any inherent biases in news production, specifically by examining the criteria determining news selection and presentation. To address this question, this project aims to identify specific mass shooting incidents as they appear in the media through the Cline Center’s Global News Index. This process entails correlating distinct shooting events with their corresponding media reports and identifying various characteristics related to news and its media sources.

08/17/2023

EMPLOYEE SPOTLIGHT: Meet Ajay Singh.

Dr. Singh has been a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Cline Center since summer of 2022 and has been affiliated with the Cline Center since 2008. Dr. Singh received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Illinois in 2022. His dissertation examines the impacts of information and communication technology implementation on small and mid-sized policing agencies, and how both social activists and law enforcement conceptualize and practice understandings of transparency and accountability in policing. His current research focuses on documenting uses of lethal force by law enforcement.

Dr. Singh is the coordinator for the Cline Center’s External Engagement Team and is on the leadership team for the Cline Center’s SPOTLITE project where he leads many of the project’s qualitative research efforts.

06/16/2023

The first graph are mentions of the word “Juneteenth” in the New York Times, 1980 to 2023. The second graph are a closeup of monthly New York Times mentions of “Juneteenth”, 2019 to 2023. Data for both graphs come from the Cline Center’s Global News Index.

06/01/2023

The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research has been honored with a 2023 Campus Excellence in Public Engagement Faculty & Staff Team Award by the University of Illinois. Recognizing the Cline Center’s sustained record of high-impact public engagement research, this is a shared honor for all research team members who have contributed over the years to the center’s many projects that aim to transform information into knowledge that advances human flourishing.

For more details about the award, see: https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/801396025

04/11/2023

We are pleased to announce the Cline Center’s 2023 Schroeder Summer Fellowships. Congrats to Zach Jablow and Deli Yang! To read about their interesting projects visit: https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/get-involved/SchroederFellows