# Context This data-set contains information from the "Protocol Gift Util" in the US department of state, which documents all of the official gifts accepted by the president and white house staff. Quoting from the [U.S. Department of State website](http://www.state.gov/s/cpr/c29447.htm): > The Protocol Gift Unit within the Office of the Chief of Protocol serves as the central processing point for all tangible gifts received from foreign sources by employees of the Executive Branch of the Federal government. The Unit is responsible for the creation and maintenance of the official record of all gifts presented by the Department of State to officials of foreign governments. Working closely with the Chief of Protocol and the staffs of the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of State, the Gift Unit selects the gifts presented to foreign dignitaries. Gifts received by the President, Vice President, and the Secretary of State and their spouses from foreign governments are also handled by the Gift Unit in the Office of Protocol. # Content The file contains data scraped from the the Protocol Gift Unit website (the R script and more information about exclusions and possible issues can be found [here](https://github.com/ytoren/ProtocolGifts). * Number of recorded gifts: 1913 (after some exclusions) * Years: 2002 to 2015 * Encoding: UTF8 (with many special characters) # Inspiration Looking forward to see how people can use creative text mining techniques to extract more information about the different columns (for example classify givers / receivers, tag geographies, extract the gift object from the description text, etc.). You can find my future humble attempts [here](https://github.com/ytoren/ProtocolGifts).