The data is available as zip files in tab-separated value format using a CSV extension for easy import into Microsoft Excel or similar spreadsheet software.
[8] In a blog post for Foreign Policy, co-creator Kalev Leetaru attempted to use GDELT data to answer the question of whether the Arab Spring sparked protests worldwide, using the quotient of the number of protest-related events to the total number of events recorded as a measure of protest intensity for which the time trend was then studied.
[9] Political scientist and data science/forecasting expert Jay Ulfelder critiqued the post on his personal blog, saying that Leetaru's normalization method may not have adequately accounted for the change in the nature and composition of media coverage.
[10][16][17] The dataset has been cited and critiqued repeatedly in Foreign Policy,[2][18] including in discussions of political events in Syria,[19] the Arab Spring,[9][20] and Nigeria.
[25][26] Alex Hanna blogged about her experiment assessing GDELT with hand-coded data by comparing it with the Dynamics of Collective Action dataset.