Conflict and Mediation Event Observations


Conflict and Mediation Event Observations is a framework for coding event data. It is a more recent alternative to the WEIS coding system developed by Charles A. McClelland and the Conflict and Peace Data Bank coding system developed by Edward Azar.

History

Work on CAMEO began in 2000 at Kansas University with financial support from the National Science Foundation. The first paper on the subject, by Deborah J. Gerner was written for the March 2002 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association in New Orleans. In the paper, the authors noted that they worked on creating the new CAMEO system rather than continue using the existing WEIS coding system for a combination of reasons, including previously known weaknesses of WEIS and some difficulties that emerge when trying to automate the WEIS coding process. The coding software used for CAMEO, as well as for the automated WEIS implementation that CAMEO was compared with, was the Textual Analysis by Augmeted Replacement Instructions software developed by co-author Philip A. Schrodt in 2000, and was in turn based on the Kansas Event Data System developed in 1994.
The CAMEO manual describes the following key stages of the history of work on the project:
One of the alternatives to CAMEO is Integrated Data for Events Analysis, an outgrowth of work by the PANDA project. Predecessors to CAMEO include the World Interaction/Event Survey coding system by Charles A. McClelland and the Conflict and Peace Data Bank by Edward Azar.
Some key differences between CAMEO and IDEA are:

Academic reception

CAMEO has been the subject of a number of academic papers comparing it with other coding frameworks.

Datasets that use CAMEO coding