I am an empirical legal scholar with a focus on international law, human rights and legal data science.
My practical legal work and academic research focus on international human rights law, cultural rights, humanitarian law and international criminal law, with a particular emphasis on the protection of cultural heritage in Iraq and the prosecution of atrocity crimes committed by Da'esh (also known as ISIS, ISIL or the Islamic State). I am co-author of numerous reports on the situation of human rights in Iraq and lead author of the internationally noted 'Destroying the Soul of the Yazidis: Cultural Heritage Destruction during the Islamic State’s Genocide against the Yazidis' report, which was later published as a peer-reviewed academic paper.
As a data scientist, I specialize in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning in the legal domain, quantitative peace research, data engineering and data analysis with the R programming language. I am the first author and maintainer of more than a dozen open access research data sets, primarily corpora of legal and political texts, with quantitative and qualitative applications in the fields of law, political science and economics. My open source software is developed in public on GitHub, with stable and citeable versions released on Zenodo, the scientific repository of the high-energy physics research organization CERN.
Learn more about my work on my personal website at https://www.seanfobbe.com