The jury consisting of Nils B Weidmann (University of Konstanz), Hanne Fjelde (Uppsala University) and Michael D Ward (Duke University) has awarded the second JPR Best Visualization Award to Thomas Chadefaux (Trinity College Dublin). The prize-winning article is titled “Early warning signals for war in the news” and was published in the January issue. The article uses a variety of graphical illustrations to illustrate how information in news articles predicts the onset of wars. Simple line plots of the number of conflict-related news before and after the actual onset communicate the striking increase in coverage at the date of onset, and its immediate decline immediately after. In the predictive analysis, ROC curves, precision-recall curves and bar plots effectively inform the reader about the power of the approach to predict conflict out-of-sample, and how this performance varies between different types of war. Where necessary, these plots also show the uncertainty around these results. All-in-all, by using very simple plots in many places throughout the article, the author does a great job in improving accessibility and communication of the various results. The award is USD 500.

The article is available online