FOCUSdata Project: Foreign Official Communication Using Sentiment Data
Research topics, phrases, and sentiment from Russian, Chinese, Iranian & North Korean foreign ministry statements and state media articles
Select the country and database (e.g. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs or Global Times, Russia’s Sputnik, etc.), then search using the terms of your choice, or access our lists of top topics and phrases. Select a database using the menus above or information below. Export your findings for further research using the tools of your choice. Data provided for non-commercial, academic research only.
Analyze what Russia, North Korea, China, and Iran have published in English through their official media or foreign ministry websites on any topic of interest, from area studies and political science to economics and pop culture. Use the links above to select a database and then enter your search term(s). For those interested in downloading an entire dataset, please contact us, or visit our ‘dataverse‘ on Harvard’s Dataverse site.
The FOCUSdata project was created by the National Security Studies Department at New Jersey City University (NJCU) working with the Rutgers University Center for Critical Intelligence Studies under a grant from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The information we provide here is for non-commercial, academic research purposes only; please include your academic affiliation when requesting one of our datasets.
Russia: Search articles from Russia’s Sputnik News, Russia Today and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The data includes hundreds of thousands of English articles, some sources going back over 10 years.
China: Search our Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) database of English content posted starting in November 2000, or search the top topics of China’s MOFA from 2000 through 2019. Also available are hundreds of thousands of English-language articles from People’s Daily and Global Times.
North Korea: Search English-language articles from North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) posted from 1 October 2008 to 27 February 2020 or visit our KCNA dataverse for access to Korean-language articles from 1 Oct 2013 to 31 Jan 2021, just over 105,000 articles. Rodong Sinmun – search our database of English content posted from 2 January 2018 to 31 December 2019. This content represents all articles available at the time of the scrape in January 2020, just over 7,100 unique articles.
Iran: Sarch Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency database or Ministry of Foreign Affairs database. The Ministry data contains English statements from the Ministry spokesperson, Iranian President, Iranian’s Supreme Leader, and the Foreign Affairs Minister.
