Analytics

Research reveals what Google searches can tell us about the global human rights movement

siddiq22 — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 19:33:40 +0000

Research reveals what Google searches can tell us about the global human rights movement

siddiq22 Thu, 04/27/2023 - 15:33

Cutline

Geoff Dancy, an associate professor of political science at U of T Mississauga, used Google Trends to research where in the world people are most interested in human rights (photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)

Kristy Strauss

Topic

Breaking Research

Analytics

Faculty & Staff

Human Rights

Political Science

Research

Technology

University of Toronto Mississauga

When Geoff Dancy wanted to research where people are most interested in human rights, he fully expected it would come from countries in the Global North – such as Canada and the United States.

But when Dancy – an associate professor in the University of Toronto Mississauga's department of political science – and his colleague delved deeper into the topic, they discovered the total opposite was true: it is those in the Global South, who regularly face suffering and violence at the hands of their governments, who consistently search online for information about human rights.

“Our expectations were completely flipped on their head,” Dancy says. “It goes against this academic narrative that exists right now that human rights aren’t from – and don’t resonate in – the Global South. We found the exact opposite of that.”

Dancy, along with his colleague Christopher Fariss, an assistant professor in the University of Michigan's department of political science, detail their findings in a new paper published in The American Political Science Review.

As part of their research, Dancy and Fariss used the Google Trends analytics tool, which collects aggregated data on what people are searching for on Google. They examined Google searches from between 2015 and 2019 for the term “human rights,” looking at data from 109 countries and across five languages.

As they analyzed the data, they discovered that interest in human rights was more pronounced in the Global South – for example, in countries such as Guatemala, Honduras, Zimbabwe and Uganda.

Ugandan activists gathered for a Pride rally in 2015 to mark a temporary loosening of anti-LGBTQ+ laws – in recent years, the government has passed stringent legislation against being openly gay (photo by Isaac Kasamani /AFP via Getty Images)

Dancy and Fariss found that the top three countries that searched for “human rights” the most in English were Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Uganda. In the Spanish-language group, the most searches came from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico.

“The biggest correlation of searching for human rights is political violence," Darcy says. "If you live in a place where the government is attacking its citizens, then you see more searches for human rights."

He points to Uganda, whose government has passed stringent anti-LGBTQ+ laws that subject people to lifetime imprisonment – and more recently, the death penalty – for being openly gay.

“People are searching for human rights because they want to fight back against that,” Dancy says.

In Global North countries, the researchers discovered a different pattern. The United States, which did not make the top 12 searchers, scored high for one week in the summer of 2018 when there was extensive media coverage of family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border.

While Dancy notes that 2021 falls outside of the study’s time period, he has since discovered a similar pattern in Canada. In September 2021, Google searches for human rights spiked in Canada – which coincides with major news events at the time, such as the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, as well as vaccine mandates.

“In the Global North, they get very brief and ‘faddish’ interest in human rights and then it goes away,” Dancy says. “But in the Global South, people are constantly searching for human rights. There aren’t spikes and troughs, just steady searches.”

He adds that the research challenges scholars who claim that many people today are less attuned to concepts around human rights.

“There are a number of scholars who argue that human rights isn’t getting the job done – it isn’t going far enough to make change, and so people will lose interest in human rights as a global movement,” Dancy says.

“But people in the Global South very much want human rights . . . and find them to be a useful tool still. In some ways, this [research] is a reclamation of the importance of the human-rights movement around the world.”

The research received support from the Global Challenges Research Fund, the Social Science Korea Human Rights Forum, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea.

#Rio2016: How ‘moneyball’ research from U of T can help athletes reach for Olympic gold

lanthierj — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 18:55:52 +0000

#Rio2016: How ‘moneyball’ research from U of T can help athletes reach for Olympic gold

lanthierj Thu, 08/11/2016 - 14:55

Cutline

Tennis fan Professor Timothy Chan is applying his expertise in mathematical optimization to help amateur sports federations across the country make the most of their limited resources (photo courtesy Professor Chan)

Tyler Irving

Author legacy

Tyler Irving

Topic

Global Lens

Olympics

Rio

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Mechanical & Industrial Engineering

Sports

Analytics

Timothy Chan

When Professor Timothy Chan sits down to watch a game of hockey, baseball or tennis, he isn’t taking a break from his research — he may be hard at work on a new paper.

A professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, Chan's expertise in sports analytics and decision modelling has been sought out by the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) in the hopes that it could provide a competitive edge for amateur athletes.

Professional sports teams been leveraging statistics to improve team performance for more than a decade. By examining detailed data about how each player performs in various situations, analysts can build computer models that attempt to predict long-term performance. The technique, made famous in the Michael Lewis book and its film adaptation, Moneyball, empowers teams that can’t afford star players to make smarter use of the resources they do have.

This year, Chan’s research team attracted the attention of the COC as part of its National Sport Federation Enhancement Initiative (NSFEI). NSFEI is a four-year project designed to help Canada’s federations improve their organizational capacity, including business operations, leadership and governance, as well as their ability to effectively recruit young, talented athletes into their sports.

“National Sport Federations in Canada are resource constrained,” says David Patterson, who leads the initiative for the COC. “We see analytics as a way to better allocate scarce resources. These benefits could apply both on the field of play and away from competition, where we work hard to attract and retain more Canadians to a lifestyle in sport.”

Chan came to Patterson’s attention in 2013 after he won the best paper award at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. “Sloan is the top conference in the field, so it made sense to approach Dr. Chan as the best among the best in analytics.”

Read about the award-winning paper

This past spring, Chan travelled to Ottawa and Calgary to deliver two seminars on sports analytics. “We started to work through some areas where we thought analytics could help,” he says. “The idea is that they can narrow down the focus and propose a research project that we could execute.”

Since the seminar, Chan has been working with Tennis Canada to help increase youth participation in the sport. Chan is determining the best locations in Canada to hold winter tennis camps, based on local demand and available indoor facilities. The goal is to make sure that the resource-intensive camps reach the maximum number of potential future Eugenie Bouchards.

Chan got into the sports analytics field almost by accident. As the Canada Research Chair in Novel Optimization and Analytics in Health, he primarily works on optimizing the delivery of health care. His research group has studied locations of automatic defibrillators within a city and deployment of ambulances in developing countries.

Read about Chan's work on defibrillators

However, Chan is also a big sports fan, and his models can offer insights for the sports world.

Read about Chan and hockey

“A lot of sports analytics is focused on statistics,” he says “whereas my background is in optimization.” Chan’s models not only predict future performance, they can be used to optimize performance in different scenarios — for example, determining how baseball players should switch defensive positions on the field if a player gets injured and a substitute is brought into the game.

Sports analytics is just one small branch of Chan’s research program, but he finds it rewarding from a problem-solving perspective and enjoys the chance to apply his work to help the community.

“I started this as a fun topic, but it’s definitely something I would be interested to spend more time looking at,” he says. “I think that the problems in this domain are very interesting, and there is still a lot of room for growth. There’s an opportunity to make a real impact.”