UN staff members conducting political analysis need to find relevant information quickly, especially in times of crisis.
Often, they will seek to map what different UN Member States are saying on a specific topic to identify the sentiments of the diplomatic community; however, going through different Member State websites manually to find their statements is time-consuming, especially when analyzing states across a range of regions.
To support UN staff members, as well as others interested in diplomatic messages, the UN DPPA Innovation Cell and the Qatar Computing Research Institute at Hamad Bin Khalifa University developed a new search engine for diplomatic statements and press releases called Diplomatic Pulse.
The easy-to-use application is available free of charge and doesn’t require registration. The Diplomatic Pulse scrapes the websites of Foreign Ministries and Permanent Missions every 15 minutes to offer updated information and allows for archival research.
“Being able to access press statements in a quick and transparent way is a simple, time-saving, and analysis-enriching tool to the diplomatic community,” said Teresa Whitfield, Director of the UN DPPA’s Policy and Mediation Division.
At the same time, the development of an archive has huge potential for computational social scientists to analyze the history of diplomatic narratives.
Using Diplomatic Pulse, you can search statements by country, keyword, or timeframe.
You can gather relevant statements into a PDF report that is easy to use independently or as a part of a broader set of materials.
It saves the time for actual analysis!
During one week at the end of February, the keyword “Ukraine” was used 442 times in different Member State press releases. Finding all those manually would’ve taken hours. With Diplomatic Pulse, finding these statements took only 25 seconds.
The Innovation Cell of the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) is a dedicated capacity to explore, pioneer, and support new cross-cutting methodologies for peace.
We warmly welcome feedback on the Diplomatic Pulse search engine at DPPA-innovation@un.org.
