Building new datasets for foreign and security policy analysis

I have long been very frustrated about the lack of a systematic empirical basis for our analysis of foreign and security policy. Newspapers, with their many well-known biases, essentially dictate what 'facts' are and 'analysts' and 'scholars' then cherry-pick these 'facts' to buttress whatever theory, ideology, etc. they espouse.  A number of new datasets and tools hold great promise to revolutionize this state of affairs.