MMCHIVED: Multimodal Chile and Venezuela Protest Event Data

Abstract

This paper introduces the Multimodal Chile & Venezuela Protest Event Dataset (MMCHIVED). MMCHIVED contains city-day event data using a new source of data, text and images shared on social media. These data enables the improved measurement of theoretically important variables such as protest size, protester and state violence, protester demographics, and emotions. In Venezuela, MMCHIVED records many more protests than existing datasets. In Chile, it records slightly more events than the Armed Conflict Location and Events Dataset (ACLED). These extra events are from small cities far from Caracas and Santiago, an improvement of coverage over datasets that rely on newspapers, and the paper confirms they are true positives. While MMCHIVED covers protest events in Chile and Venezuela, the approach used in the paper is generalizable and could generate protest event data in 107 countries containing 97.14% of global GDP and 82.7% of the world's population.