politicaldata.org

NOTE: The MIPT Terrorist Knowledge Base doesn’t appear to be online anymore. The Global Terrorism Database seems like a comparable source.

The MIPT Terrorist Knowledge Base (www.tkb.org) provides data on international terrorist incidents since 1968 and domestic terrorist incidents since 1998. The database is updated monthly. Each terrorist incident can be looked up individually online but the whole database is not distributed publicly. In a recent paper I examined the effects of terrorism on coalition formation (Indridason, Indridi H. “Does Terrorism Influence Domestic Politics? Coalition Formation and Terrorist Incidents.” Forthcoming 2008. Journal of Peace Research 45(2)) and to obtain the data I wrote a perl-script that flips through each page and retrieves that data. Dave Armstrong deserves credit for giving me the idea to write the script. Even if you are not interested in terrorist data, the script should be fairly easy to adopt to download any data on the web – it only took me a couple of days to write the script without having ever touched perl before.

terror perl script