Dataset Card for the TRC Volume 7 Final Report Victim List

Dataset Summary

Languages

English

Data Instances

A typical data point comprises the metadata for a victim in Volume 7 of the TRC's Final Report.

An example from the dataset looks as follows:

{
    "full_name": "Thabo Simon Aaron",
    "lastname": "Aaron",
    "firstname": "Thabo Simon",
    "description": "An ANCYL member who was shot and severely injured by SAP members at Lephoi, Bethulie, Orange Free State (OFS) on 17 April 1991. Police opened fire on a gathering at an ANC supporter's house following a dispute between two neighbours, one of whom was linked to the ANC and the other to the SAP and a councillor.",
    "place": [
        "Bethulie"
    ],
    "homeland": [],
    "province": [
        "Orange Free State"
    ],
    "hrv": [
        "shoot",
        "injure"
    ],
    "org": [
        "ANC (African National Congress)",
        "ANCYL (African National Congress Youth League)",
        "Police",
        "SAP (South African Police)"
    ],
    "date": [
        datetime.date(1991, 4, 17)
    ],
    "coordinates": [
        25.97552,
        -30.50329
    ],
    "age": 22,
    "gender": "Unknown"
}

Data Fields

Curation Rationale

Initial Data Collection and Normalization

Who are the source language producers?

The initial testimonies were collected by administrators and interviewers for the TRC. These interviews were then interrogated and researchers for the TRC determined which individuals met the threshold to be including in this the Volume 7 Final Report.

Annotations

Annotation process

To annotate the data, we leveraged Python and spaCy to automate the identification of categories of human rights violations, places, homelands, provinces, gender, and dates. To identify coordinates, we automated the mapping of identifiable places with no toponyms in South Africa, such as Cape Town. For more challenging places (approximately 2,000 locations), we performed manual validation. In some cases, specifically places with many toponyms, we provided the most likely candidate.

Who are the annotators?

The annotators for places were Steve Davis (PI) Robert Vaughn (Geographer).

Personal and Sensitive Information

The dataset contains the personal details of victims of human rights violations in South Africa. This data is already publicly available.

Social Impact of Dataset

Discussion of Biases

Other Known Limitations

Dataset Curators

Steve Davis, Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky

William J.B. Mattingly, Postdoc Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution

Robert Vaughn

Licensing Information

Citation Information

Contributions

Thanks to the TRC for cultivating the original data. Thanks to SAHA-SABC for making the initial dataset available as a CSV file.