This project will devise interactive, integrated, digital library/archive systems coupled with linked and expert-curated webpage/tweet collections, covering key parts of the 1997-2020 timeframe, supporting research on urgent global challenge events and initiatives. It will allow diverse stakeholder communities to interactively collect, organize, browse, visualize, study, analyze, summarize, and explore content and sources related to biodiversity, climate change, crises, disasters, elections, energy policy, environmental policy/planning, geospatial information, green engineering, human rights, inequality, migrations, nuclear power, population growth, resiliency, shootings, sustainability, violence, etc. Studying and addressing important global issues, by scholars, the public, and K-12 students, will be enhanced through tailored interfaces coupled with important collections that will be primary resources for understanding the modern world and its challenges, as well as initiatives, trends, and solutions.
Research will extend work on modeling trends, events, and sources, to guide focused crawling, information extraction, tagging, and collaboration. Domain experts will leverage rich event models, exploiting the generality of the 5S framework (Societies, Scenarios, Spaces, Structure, Streams), extending from word, n-gram, topic, concept, and language models. This research will enable efficient assembly of knowledge bases, rapid prototyping of interfaces, gathering/curation of collections with high precision and recall, and flexible discovery in support of research and learning. Interdisciplinary research advances will address digital humanities, web archiving, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, and the construction of valuable interactive/collaborative interfaces. For further information see the project web site at eventsarchive.org.