One hundred years of migration discourse in The Times: A discourse-historical word vector space approach to the construction of meaning

in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (2020), 3(64),

This study proposes an experimental method to trace the historical evolution of media discourse as a means to investigate the construction of collective meaning. Based on distributional semantics theory ... [more ▼]

This study proposes an experimental method to trace the historical evolution of media discourse as a means to investigate the construction of collective meaning. Based on distributional semantics theory (Harris, 1954; Firth, 1957) and critical discourse theory (Wodak and Fairclough, 1997), it explores the value of merging two techniques widely employed to investigate language and meaning in two separate fields: neural word embeddings (computational linguistics) and the discourse-historical approach (DHA; Reisigl and Wodak, 2001) (applied linguistics). As a use case, we investigate the historical changes in the semantic space of public discourse of migration in the United Kingdom, and we use the Times Digital Archive (TDA) from 1900 to 2000 as dataset. For the computational part, we use the publicly available TDA word2vec models1 (Kenter et al., 2015; Martinez-Ortiz et al., 2016); these models have been trained according to sliding time windows with the specific intention to map conceptual change. We then use DHA to triangulate the results generated by the word vector models with social and historical data to identify plausible explanations for the changes in the public debate. By bringing the focus of the analysis to the level of discourse, with this method, we aim to go beyond mapping different senses expressed by single words and to add the currently missing sociohistorical and sociolinguistic depth to the computational results. The study rests on the foundation that social changes will be reflected in changes in public discourse (Couldry, 2008). Although correlation does not prove direct causation, we argue that historical events, language, and meaning should be considered as a mutually reinforcing cycle in which the language used to describe events shapes explicit meanings, which in turn trigger other events, which again will be reflected in the public discourse. [less ▲]

Machine Learning to Geographically Enrich Understudied Sources: A Conceptual Approach

in Rocha, Ana; Steels, Luc; van den Herik, Jaap (Eds.) Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ARTIDIGH (2020)

This paper discusses the added value of applying machine learning (ML) to contextually enrich digital collections. In this study, we employed ML as a method to geographically enrich historical datasets ... [more ▼]

This paper discusses the added value of applying machine learning (ML) to contextually enrich digital collections. In this study, we employed ML as a method to geographically enrich historical datasets. Specifically, we used a sequence tagging tool (Riedl and Padó 2018) which implements TensorFlow to perform NER on a corpus of historical immigrant newspapers. Afterwards, the entities were extracted and geocoded. The aim was to prepare large quantities of unstructured data for a conceptual historical analysis of geographical references. The intention was to develop a method that would assist researchers working in spatial humanities, a recently emerged interdisciplinary field focused on geographic and conceptual space. Here we describe the ML methodology and the geocoding phase of the project, focussing on the advantages and challenges of this approach, particularly for humanities scholars. We also argue that, by choosing to use largely neglected sources such as immigrant newspapers (a lso known as ethnic newspapers), this study contributes to the debate about diversity representation and archival biases in digital practices. [less ▲]

The media construction of Italian identity: A transatlantic, digital humanities analysis of italianità, ethnicity, and whiteness, 1880-1920

in Identity (2019)

This article explores a novel way to understand the process of diasporic identity formation by comparing the discursive structure of Italian diasporic newspapers published in the United States with the ... [more ▼]

This article explores a novel way to understand the process of diasporic identity formation by comparing the discursive structure of Italian diasporic newspapers published in the United States with the baseline of public discourse in Italy. It uses as its evidence Italian language newspapers published in the United States from 1898 to 1920 (ChroniclItaly) and the Italian newspaper La Stampa published in Italy between 1867 and 1900. Applying a mixed-method approach of close and distant reading, the study examines how the ideological concept of Italian identity, linguistically represented by the anchor word italianità, “Italianness”, was constructed in these printed media at the turn of the twentieth century. The overarching aim is to explore how differences in the two identity constructions can be explained from their specific historical contexts: the process of ethnic integration and redefinition in the United States as opposed to the need to consolidate national unity in the face of emerging nations and nationalism within Europe. [less ▲]

The GeoNewsMiner (GNM): An interactive spatial humanities tool to visualize geographical references in historical newspapers

Software (2019)