A Quantitative Discourse Analysis of Asian Workers in the US Historical Newspapers

Jaihyun Park, Ryan Cordell


Abstract
The digitization of historical texts invites researchers to explore the large-scale corpus of historical texts with computational methods. In this study, we present computational text analysis on a relatively understudied topic of how Asian workers are represented in historical newspapers in the United States. We found that the word “coolie” was semantically different in some States (e.g., Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Arkansas) with the different discourses around coolie. We also found that then-Confederate newspapers and then-Union newspapers formed distinctive discourses by measuring over-represented words. Newspapers from then-Confederate States associated coolie with slavery-related words. In addition, we found Asians were perceived to be inferior to European immigrants and subjected to the target of racism. This study contributes to supplementing the qualitative analysis of racism in the United States with quantitative discourse analysis.
Anthology ID:
2023.nlp4dh-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint 3rd International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities and 8th International Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Uralic Languages
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Tokyo, Japan
Editors:
Mika Hämäläinen, Emily Öhman, Flammie Pirinen, Khalid Alnajjar, So Miyagawa, Yuri Bizzoni, Niko Partanen, Jack Rueter
Venues:
NLP4DH | IWCLUL
SIG:
SIGUR
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7–15
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlp4dh-1.2
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jaihyun Park and Ryan Cordell. 2023. A Quantitative Discourse Analysis of Asian Workers in the US Historical Newspapers. In Proceedings of the Joint 3rd International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities and 8th International Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Uralic Languages, pages 7–15, Tokyo, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Quantitative Discourse Analysis of Asian Workers in the US Historical Newspapers (Park & Cordell, NLP4DH-IWCLUL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlp4dh-1.2.pdf