Riot Acts | National Council on Public History

Project Details

Riot Acts is a digital history project that uses geospatial visualization, network analysis, and artificial intelligence to provide new insight into the complicated and important origins of extralegal violence in the United States. Spanning from the end of the American Revolution through the end of the Civil War, this project currently contains over 2,200 instances of extralegal activity, including riots, lynchings, acts of vigilantism, and more. In order to represent and better study this history, Riot Acts provides a web-based platform for audiences and researchers to approach extralegal violence from multiple angles. The project, aimed at both a public audience and specialists, is completely free and open-source.

Subjects or Themes

Riots, Civil War, Lynching, Vigilantes, Extralegal executions,

Project Language(s)

English

Time Period

Geographic Location

Project Categories

Content Type

Mapping, Network Analysis, Machine Learning, Database, Text

Target Audience(s)

Creators

Patrick Hoehne

Year(s)

2021

Host Institution / Affiliation / Project Location

University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Software Employed

Labor and Support

Riot Acts is an independent project developed by Patrick Hoehne, a PhD student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, over the course of a year. At least 600 hours of labor went in to the production of this project. This includes the research, database complication, GIS mapping, network analysis, and web development. Graphic design by Jacqueline Klausner adds an additional 40 hours. The project's dataset initially emerged from the notecards of the historian Paul Gilje, compiled by Peter Turchin and made available by Ohio State University's Criminal Justice Research Center. Original archival research and datasets from several additional books provided several hundred more incidents to the dataset.