HR-VEAW: A Human Rights Violation Exploration, Analytics, and Warning System

The availability of information from social media, such as tweets, and human rights monitors, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the US State Department has led to new opportunities to measure repression and human rights protections in higher resolution. In this paper, we present HR-VEAW, a Human Rights Violation Exploration, Analytics, and Warning system, to support understanding of social conflict dynamics and human rights violations/protections with quantitative data. After briefly discussing HR-VEAW’s data acquisition and analysis components, we demonstrate how it visualizes rich spatio-temporal and conceptual information, enabling the examination of changes in patterns of violation and protection in aggregate over time, or across both space and time. This way HR-VEAW helps to explain social instability and conflicts and to guide decision-making, theorizing, and predictions.