Analyzing political formation through historical isiXhosa text analysis: Using frequency analysis to examine emerging African Nationalism in South Africa

Jonathan Schoots


Abstract
This paper showcases new research avenues made possible by applying computational methods to historical isiXhosa text. I outline a method for isiXhosa computational text analysis which adapts word frequency analysis to be applied to isiXhosa texts focusing on root words. The paper showcases the value of the approach in a study of emerging political identities in early African nationalism, examining a novel dataset of isiXhosa newspapers from 1874 to 1890. The analysis shows how a shared identity of ‘Blackness’ (Abantsundu and Abamnyama) dynamically emerged, and follows the impact of leading intellectuals as well as African voter mobilization in shaping communal political discourse.
Anthology ID:
2023.rail-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL 2023)
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Rooweither Mabuya, Don Mthobela, Mmasibidi Setaka, Menno Van Zaanen
Venue:
RAIL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
65–75
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.rail-1.8
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.rail-1.8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jonathan Schoots. 2023. Analyzing political formation through historical isiXhosa text analysis: Using frequency analysis to examine emerging African Nationalism in South Africa. In Proceedings of the Fourth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL 2023), pages 65–75, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Analyzing political formation through historical isiXhosa text analysis: Using frequency analysis to examine emerging African Nationalism in South Africa (Schoots, RAIL 2023)
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https://aclanthology.org/2023.rail-1.8.pdf
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