The GDELT Project, or Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone, created by

Kalev Leetaru Kalev Hannes Leetaru is an American internet entrepreneur, academic, and senior fellow at the George Washington University School of Engineering and Applied Science Center for Cyber & Homeland Security in Washington, D.C. He was a former Yahoo! F ...

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

and

Georgetown University Georgetown University is a private university, private Jesuit research university in Washington, D.C., United States. Founded by Bishop John Carroll (archbishop of Baltimore), John Carroll in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic higher education, Ca ...

, along with Philip Schrodt and others, describes itself as "an initiative to construct a catalog of human societal-scale behavior and beliefs across all countries of the world, connecting every person, organization, location, count, theme, news source, and event across the planet into a single massive network that captures what's happening around the world, what its context is and who's involved, and how the world is feeling about it, every single day." Early explorations leading up to the creation of GDELT were described by co-creator Philip Schrodt in a conference paper in January 2011. The dataset is available on

Google Cloud Platform Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google that provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, Computer data storage, data storage, Data analysis, data analytics, and machine learnin ...

Data

GDELT includes data from 1979 to the present. The data is available as zip files in tab-separated value format using a CSV extension for easy import into

Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet editor developed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows, Windows, macOS, Android (operating system), Android, iOS and iPadOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a ...

or similar spreadsheet software. Data from 1979 to 2005 is available in the form of one zip file per year, with the file size gradually increased from 14.3 MB in 1979 to 125.9 MB in 2005, reflecting the increase in the number of news media and the frequency and comprehensiveness of event recording. Data files from January 2006 to March 2013 are available at monthly granularity, with the zipped file size rising from 11 MB in January 2006 to 103.2 MB in March 2013. Data files from April 1, 2013 onward are available at a daily granularity. The data file for each date is made available by 6 AM

Eastern Standard Time The Eastern Time Zone (ET) is a time zone encompassing part or all of 23 states in the eastern part of the United States, parts of eastern Canada, and the state of Quintana Roo in Mexico. * Eastern Standard Time (EST) is five hours behind ...

the next day. As of June 2014, the size of the daily zipped file is about 5-12 MB. The data files use

Conflict and Mediation Event Observations Conflict and Mediation Event Observations (CAMEO) is a framework for coding event data (typically used for events that merit news coverage, and generally applied to the study of political news and violence). It is a more recent alternative to the W ...

(CAMEO) coding for recording events. In a blog post for ''

Foreign Policy Foreign policy, also known as external policy, is the set of strategies and actions a State (polity), state employs in its interactions with other states, unions, and international entities. It encompasses a wide range of objectives, includ ...

'', co-creator

attempted to use GDELT data to answer the question of whether the

Arab Spring The Arab Spring () was a series of Nonviolent resistance, anti-government protests, Rebellion, uprisings, and Insurgency, armed rebellions that spread across much of the Arab world in the early 2010s. It began Tunisian revolution, in Tunisia ...

sparked protests worldwide, using the quotient of the number of protest-related events to the total number of events recorded as a measure of ''protest intensity'' for which the time trend was then studied. Political scientist and data science/forecasting expert

Jay Ulfelder Jay Ulfelder is an American political scientist who is best known for his work on political forecasting, specifically on anticipating various forms of political instability around the world. From 2001 to 2010, he served as research director of the ...

critiqued the post on his personal blog, saying that Leetaru's normalization method may not have adequately accounted for the change in the nature and composition of media coverage. The dataset is also available on

and can be accessed using Google BigQuery.

Reception

Academic reception

Researchers have widely adopted GDELT for scholarly inquiries, showcasing its versatility and value in social and computational sciences: # Media Analytics & Financial Prediction #* A study on ''Visual and Predictive Analytics of Singapore News'' used GDELT alongside Wikipedia and Singapore’s Straits Times Index to assess data completeness, extract event terms, and predict stock market movements via decision-tree models # Global Conflict & Disaster Coverage #* Scholars have leveraged GDELT’s dataset—spanning thousands of global event codes—to explore determinants of media attention to disasters through hierarchical regression, uncovering patterns like regional bias in news coverage. # Image Content Analysis #* Utilizing GDELT’s comprehensive photo database from news outlets, researchers applied deep-learning vision APIs to analyze millions of news images, examining object frequency, sentiment alignment with text, and visual representation of political figures. # Behavioral Modeling Challenges #* At SBP 2014, GDELT served as the core dataset for a Grand Data Challenge, where participants applied spatial, temporal, and network analysis to model human behavior, identify social influencers, and forecast societal events.

Reception in blogs and media

GDELT has been covered on the website of th
Center for Data Innovation
as well as the GIS Lounge. It has also been discussed and critiqued on blogs about political violence and crisis prediction. The dataset has been cited and critiqued repeatedly in ''

'', including in discussions of political events in

Syria Syria, officially the Syrian Arab Republic, is a country in West Asia located in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. It borders the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Turkey to Syria–Turkey border, the north, Iraq to Iraq–Syria border, t ...

, the

, and

Nigeria Nigeria, officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean to the south. It covers an area of . With Demographics of Nigeria, ...

. It has also been cited in ''

New Scientist ''New Scientist'' is a popular science magazine covering all aspects of science and technology. Based in London, it publishes weekly English-language editions in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. An editorially separate organ ...

'', on the

FiveThirtyEight ''FiveThirtyEight'', also rendered as ''538'', was an American website that focused on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging in the United States. The website, which took its name from the number of electors in the U ...

website and

Andrew Sullivan Andrew Michael Sullivan (born 10 August 1963) is a British-American political commentator. Sullivan is a former editor of ''The New Republic'', and the author or editor of six books. He started a political blog, ''The Daily Dish'', in 2000, and ...

's blog. The Predictive Heuristics blog and other blogs have compared GDELT with the

Integrated Conflict Early Warning System The Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) combines a database of political events and a system using these to provide conflict early warnings. It is supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the United States. The databa ...

(ICEWS). Alex Hanna blogged about her experiment assessing GDELT with hand-coded data by comparing it with the Dynamics of Collective Action dataset. In May 2014, the

blog announced that the entire GDELT dataset would be available as a public dataset in Google BigQuery.

Outage

On June 15, 2025, GDELT started experiencing outages that soon spread to every service it offered. As of 30th June 2025, the service has not been restored despite the founder releasing posts on LinkedIn stating they are working with Google to restore services.
Ref 1Ref 2
A link to http://data.gdeltproject.org/ returns the message: "The project to be billed is associated with a closed billing account."

References

External links

* {{official website Political databases