Dr. Nicole Janz

Alfried Krupp Junior Fellow
(April 2021 - June 2021) 

  • Studied North American Studies & History, Freie University of Berlin & Columbia University
  • PhD in Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge
  • Assistant Professor (with tenure) in International Relations, University of Nottingham

Fellow project: "Testing Business Impact on Society with Machine Learning“

Business operations worldwide have a profound and lasting impact on local communities and their human rights, fueling an ongoing public debate about firms' wrongdoings. A key challenge in holding businesses accountable has been the lack of reliable, global information about when, where and why firms affect human rights. There is a wealth of media articles and NGO reports about individual cases - but this information has not been utilised to its full potential. The project will compile information based on media, NGO and company textual sources into the first systematic global data set of corporate human rights issues. Using innovative methods from computer science - unsupervised machine learning, network analysis, automated text analysis - the project will address the following question: How do businesses in different industries affect different types of human rights? The project has three objectives:

(1)   To create a novel data set of 50,000 corporate human rights violations which will be the first 'big data' set that captures global and allows systematic quantitative analysis.  
(2)   To visualise the relationships between businesses and rights in network graphs.
(3)   To introduce a new theoretical framework of interrelatedness of corporate human rights violations.