The Perils and Pitfalls of Matching War Deaths Across Lists: Part 3

We now return, after a long hiatus, to our discussion of matching violent events across datasets.  Before diving into the details we want to remind readers about what we’re doing here and why it’s important. The immediate context is a discussion of major flaws in this paper by Carpenter, Fuller and Roberts (CFR) that claims …

The Perils and Pitfalls of Matching War Deaths Across Lists: Part 2

This is my second post with Josh Dougherty of Iraq Body Count (IBC).  We asserted in the first one that Carpenter, Fuller and Roberts (CFR) did a terrible job of matching violent events in Iraq, 2004-2009, between the IBC dataset and the SIGACTs dataset of the US military and its coalition partners. In particular, CFR …

The Perils and Pitfalls of Matching War Deaths Across Lists: Part 1

I argued in an earlier post that matching deaths across lists is a nontrivial exercise that involves a lot of judgement and that, therefore, needs to be done transparently.  Here is the promised follow up post which I do jointly with Josh Dougherty of Iraq Body Count.  In fact, we’ll make this into another multi-part …