A4_1-Intro.Rmd

---
title: "Assignment 4"
author: "PLSC 31101"
date: "Fall 2020"
output: html_document
---

## Overview

__Due__: Nov 16

In this assignment, we'll use R to turn a bunch of loose text documents into a real-life database. 

The task will leverage your new R skills, especially working with strings, functions, iterations -- and thinking like a programmer!

NB: This project is based on a paper by [Rochelle Terman and Erik Voeten](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11558-016-9264-x), which involved much the same process as you'll be learning here.

## About the Data

We'll be creating a database from [Universal Period Review outcome reports](http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/UPR/Pages/BasicFacts.aspx).

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a process run by the United Nations Human Rights Council, which involves a periodic review of the human rights records of all 193 UN Member States.

Reviews take place through an interactive discussion between the State under review and other UN Member States. During this discussion any UN Member State can pose questions, comments and/or make recommendations to the States under review. States under review can then respond, stating which recommendations they reject, accept, will consider, etc. Reports are then drawn up detailing this discussion.

We will be analyzing outcome reports from the 2014 Universal Period Reviews of 42 countries, which we retrieved [here](http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/UPR/Pages/Documentation.aspx) and formatted as text documents.

The goal is to convert these semi-structured texts to a tabular dataset of **recommendations** with the following variables:

1. Text of recommendation (*text*)
2. Country to which the recommendation is directed (*to*)
3. Country that is making the recommendation (*from*)
4. The year when the review took place (*year*)
5. The response to the recommendation, i.e. whether the reviewed country rejects, accepts, etc (*decision*)

In other words, we want to turn this:

<img src="img/text.png" width="600">

into this:

<img src="img/tabular.png" width="400">

Take a few minutes to look at the files, which are located in `data/txts`, and get a sense for how they're structured.