Building a methodological framework and toolkit for news media dataset tracking of conflict and cooperation dynamics on transboundary rivers

Abstract

The management of transboundary rivers will be one of the great political and environmental challenges of the 21st century if knowledge of conflict and cooperation is not fully developed. Transboundary river conflict and cooperation are critical for the sustainable development of river basins, regional security, and stability and have significant scientific and practical implications. The construction of a dataset of transboundary water events – individual conflictive or cooperative interaction between riparian regions – provides an important data support and a factual basis for the study of transboundary rivers. However, the most representative research, the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, is built by means of manual reading for information extraction, is, thus, difficult for fast updating, and also does not cover the global changes in the past decade. This research aims to build a methodological framework for news media datasets to track conflict and cooperation dynamics on transboundary rivers, provide a mass of relevant data for the research of transboundary rivers on the globe, prepare a potent research toolkit, lay a solid foundation for further data mining research, and better suit the big data age. In order to test the effectiveness of the methodological framework and toolkit for dataset construction, this research analyses the spatial coverage, both in terms of continental and national, temporal coverage from 1953 to 2019, and content coverage and conducts relevance screening of the articles in the four representative river basins in the datasets. The results show that the datasets built by this framework can capture comprehensive content of transboundary water conflict and cooperation in both spatial and temporal coverage with acceptable data quality.