Glenn Rayp, UNU-CRIS Research Fellow, delivers RIKS Presentation at Workshop organised by University of Goettingen
Glenn Rayp, UNU-CRIS Research Fellow, has been invited to deliver his presentation on the Regional Integration Knowledge System (RIKS) platform at the workshop on "New Datasets on International and Regional Organizations –Inter-Operability, Best Practices, and the Way Forward". This workshop takes place at the University of Göttingen from 5 until 7 December 2017.
Over the last years, a number of important data generation projects have emerged on international and regional organizations. Research questions with which international and regional organizations are being approached differ, and so do the datasets that are produced to answer them. Recent years have seen an explosion of projects dedicated to systematically measuring abstract concepts of institutional design and institutional output, such as delegation, pooling, regional integration, centralization, or performance. One particularly interesting feature of this emerging research area is its plurality of methods, which range from hand coding to machine learning. At the same time, transparency in measurement, data access, and analysis is now a major issue in the debate about professional standards in the social sciences. This workshop aims to provide a platform for researchers producing data to discuss the advantages and drawbacks of their approaches, and the capabilities and limitations of their datasets. What are the major challenges in measuring aspects of international and regional organization and how can we confront them? What kinds of research questions can be answered by each project? Where do different datasets overlap, and how can such synergies be exploited? Can some data complement other projects? How can we ensure the transparency and inter-operability needed for collaborative research?
The goal of the workshop is to make projects generating data on international and regional organization fully aware of each other, and identify overlaps, synergies, problems, best practices and common research questions that could be answered. One possible outcome of the workshop is a commitment to a joint special issue on international organization data in a leading IR journal.
