The Declassification Engine attempts to determine the most important events in American foreign policy.
"Can A Computer Algorithm Do The Job Of A Historian?" is the second article in a BuzzFeed series written with help from Columbia University's History Lab. This team of historians and data scientists is developing a "Declassification Engine" that turns documents into data and mines it for insights about the history and future of official secrecy. The stories draw from the lab's searchable database of over 2 million declassified government documents.
Lawrence J. Sullivan/National Archives and Records Administration
How do we decide what counts as history? Well, there's the first draft, journalism — the stories the media tells about the events of the day. And then there are the endless subsequent iterations, mined from primary sources and dusted off and polished by historians into arguments and narratives that shape our understanding of the world.
Then there's a third option, one that is made possible by the deluge of electronic records kept in the second half of the 20th century, and tools of modern data science: automatic event detection. That's the idea that software can read historical data to try to pick out patterns — discrete events that stick out from an ocean of data as significant.
In the early 1970s, the State Department began keeping electronic records of the thousands of cables its employees sent about American interests throughout the world. Researchers at Columbia's Declassification Engine project believe it's possible to automatically distinguish periods of increased activity in these cables that correspond to historically important events.
Three Columbia University statisticians — Rahul Mazumder, Yuanjun Gao, and Jonathan Goetz — developed an advanced statistical model that allowed them to sift through 1.7 million diplomatic cables from the years 1973–1977, including 330,000-odd cables in which only the metadata has been declassified. The model, with the help of the 2,600 cores in Columbia's High Performance Computer Cluster, isolated 500 "bursts" — periods of heightened activity where more cables were being sent. And from those 500, the team investigated the top 10, what you might call the most active areas of American diplomacy in a four-year span that included the end of the Vietnam War, roiling conflict in the Middle East, and the OPEC oil embargo.
January 1977: Jimmy Carter takes office
The most pronounced burst of the period under examination starts just as Jimmy Carter takes office, in January 1977. Carter was elected on a foreign policy platform that placed human rights at the forefront. In his Jan. 20 inaugural address, Carter famously said, "Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere. Our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for those societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights." The increased amount of activity presumably relates to foreign policy changes stemming from Carter's mandate.
United States Air Force
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