Projects

For a more recent list of projects, please see my new website at the University of Konstanz.

Elections and Political Violence in Afghanistan

This project attempts to disentangle the relationship between violence and political participation. As a first step, I analyzed voting results from the recent presidential election in Afghanistan, and tried to map the spatial patterns of fraud. The results can be found here.

CShapes

CShapes is a new GIS dataset that provides historical maps of state boundaries and capitals in the post-World War II period. In addition to the dataset, we supply an extension package for the R statistical toolkit. This package enables researchers without GIS skills to perform various useful operations on the GIS maps, such as the computation of spatial weights matrices.

Geo-referencing of Ethnic Groups (GREG)

This data project geo-references ethnic groups around the world. Relying on maps and data drawn from the classical Soviet Atlas Narodov Mira, the "Geo-referencing of ethnic groups" (GREG) dataset employs geographic information systems (GIS) to represent group territories as polygons.

WarViews

The aim of the WarViews project is to create an easy-to-use front-end for the exploration of GIS data on conflict. It takes advantage of the recent proliferation of internet-based geographic software and makes geographic data on conflict available for these tools. WarViews comes in two "flavors": The static version runs in a web browser and allows the user to switch between different datasets. The dynamic version is based on Google Earth and can animate geographic data such that the development over time can be monitored.