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Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies

University of Arkansas

Terrorism in Time and Space

Home » Research » Spatial / Temporal Social Analysis » American Terrorism Study » TITAS (2006 - 2008)

Probably the most serious problem facing students of terrorism is the lack of reliable data available for public scrutiny. The American Terrorism Study (ATS), one of the nation’s longest running projects on terrorism affecting the United States, attempts to minimize this confusion by utilizing only terrorism cases resulting in indictment in federal courts as a result of an official FBI terrorism investigation. The ATS now includes information on nearly 700 terrorists indicted for over 8,000 federal criminal offenses from 1980-2004.

Recently, the National Institute of Justice funded two ATS projects to determine (1) whether sufficient open source data was available for collection to allow examination of spatial and temporal patterns of terrorist conduct, and (2) whether patterns of conduct could be identified that might be of assistance to local and federal law enforcement. The first of these projects was recently completed and data collection has begun in the second project. Findings from the first project reveal intriguing insights into the sequencing of terrorists’ preparatory conduct, the distances terrorist live from, and prepare for, terrorist targets, and variations in these patterns by group type. Both of these studies, however, were exploratory. The proposed project will collect additional temporal and spatial data on all terrorism cases in the ATS database. This will provide as complete a record as possible on the entire population of officially designated FBI terrorism cases.

Project Goal: The goal of the proposed project is to complete temporal and spatial data collection on all terrorism cases officially investigated by the FBI under the AG Guidelines for Terrorism Investigations for the period 1980-2004.

Method: Information on approximately 265 variables will be extracted from the population of federal terrorism cases from 1980-2004. The data will be extracted from open source documents and court case files using automated web extraction tools developed by the Institute for the Study of Violent Groups at Sam Houston State University. The extracted variables are coded into a server-based Oracle relational database and geographic information system (gis) developed by the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies at the University of Arkansas.

Significance of the Project: The additional data will ensure a much more comprehensive and complete record of American terrorism, thereby allowing examination of group type analyses previously not possible due to small sample sizes in earlier studies. The proposed database structure will accommodate a wide array of statistical and geospatial methodologies for scholars and analysts nationwide. 

Current Status: 

1. Data collection was performed by the Institute for the Study of Violent Groups at Sam Houston State University from mid-August 2007 until the end of December.
   Information for 100 court cases has been entered and validated

 TITAS data entry workflow to enter information about an event