Reporting artifacts in crisis event streams, measured — and a declaration standard for the field

Abstract

Crisis event catalogues are built by people reading news. Detection effort, coding conventions and retrospective revision all vary over time, and every one of them can manufacture — or absorb — the cross-domain structure a polycrisis claim is made of. This paper audits that channel directly rather than assuming it away: a declared family of reporting baselines is swept across the estimation, the sensitivity of each verdict to the baseline choice is measured, and the result is reported as part of the verdict rather than in a limitations section.

The audit's finding is that the artifact channel is load-bearing: coupling estimates that survive raw nulls do not always survive the declared baseline family, and the direction of the change is not predictable from the estimate alone. The paper therefore proposes a declaration standard — a machine-readable schema, deposited with this record, in which any crisis-stream analysis states its detection channel, its baseline family, its vintage, and what each would have to look like to overturn the result.