Lexical shifts, substantive changes, and continuity in State of the Union discourse, 1790–2014

Rule, Alix; Cointet, Jean‐Philippe; Bearman, Peter Shawn

doi:10.1073/pnas.1512221112

Cited by 136 publications

(109 citation statements)

References 31 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

108

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Finally, this study has important implications for the nascent field of computational social science. I introduced new techniques for mapping cultural networks and public deliberation that build on recent attempts to synchronize social network analysis and natural language processing (14,15). These new tools offer a more dynamic alternative to topic models and other new forms of automated text analysis that are also poorly suited for short texts such as social media messages.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, the lemma of the term "running" is "run." Next, part-of-speech taggers were applied to the lemmatized text to identify nouns, proper nouns, and noun phrases, which are most likely to define the substantive content or discussive theme of a message (15,16). Next, I measured the term frequency-inverse document frequency for each of these terms.…”

Section: Social Sciencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Combining natural language processing and network analysis to examine how advocacy organizations stimulate conversation on social media

Bail

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

114

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Social media sites are rapidly becoming one of the most important forums for public deliberation about advocacy issues. However, social scientists have not explained why some advocacy organizations produce social media messages that inspire far-ranging conversation among social media users, whereas the vast majority of them receive little or no attention. I argue that advocacy organizations are more likely to inspire comments from new social media audiences if they create "cultural bridges," or produce messages that combine conversational themes within an advocacy field that are seldom discussed together. I use natural language processing, network analysis, and a social media application to analyze how cultural bridges shaped public discourse about autism spectrum disorders on Facebook over the course of 1.5 years, controlling for various characteristics of advocacy organizations, their social media audiences, and the broader social context in which they interact. I show that organizations that create substantial cultural bridges provoke 2.52 times more comments about their messages from new social media users than those that do not, controlling for these factors. This study thus offers a theory of cultural messaging and public deliberation and computational techniques for text analysis and application-based survey research.computational social science | advocacy organizations | public deliberation | networks | natural language processing

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Social Sciencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Combining natural language processing and network analysis to examine how advocacy organizations stimulate conversation on social media

Bail

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

114

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Section: Coarse-graining the Materials Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2). Coarse-graining a text through bag-of-words is often, for example, a good first start towards finding out which were most likely written by the same author, or in the same time period, or as the raw material for accounts of cultural dynamics [20].An ideal coarse-graining not only summarizes the full system at any point in time, but provides descriptions with a useful-if probabilistic-logic connecting them together. Much remains to be 5 done in understanding the relationship between how we coarse-grain, and why: the ways in which a particular desire (summary, prediction, explanation, understanding) in a particular field (social, biological, physical) suggests a particular algorithm.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Major Transitions in Political Order

DeDeo

2017

From Matter to Life

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We present three major transitions that occur on the way to the elaborate and diverse societies of the modern era. Our account links the worlds of social animals such as pigtail macaques and monk parakeets to examples from human history, including 18th Century London and the contemporary online phenomenon of Wikipedia. From the first awareness and use of group-level social facts to the emergence of norms and their self-assembly into normative bundles, each transition represents a new relationship between the individual and the group. At the center of this relationship is the use of coarse-grained information gained via lossy compression. The role of top-down causation in the origin of society parallels that conjectured to occur in the origin and evolution of life itself.[T]hey then threw me upon the bed, and one of them (I think it was Mary Smith) kneeled on my breast, and with one hand held my throat; Mary Junque felt for my money; by my struggling about, they did not get it at that time; then they called another woman in . . . when she came in, they said cut him! cut him! -evidence of Benjamin Leethorp in the trial of Mary Junque and Mary Smith for grand larceny, Old Bailey Criminal Court, London, England; 4 April 1779 [1] Unless we are historians, the 18th Century world of Junque, Smith and Leethorp is almost impossible to imagine. In stealing from Leethorp, the two women put themselves at risk not only of imprisonment, but of indentured servitude in the colonies and even death. Leethorp, for his part, begins his evidence by explaining to the jury how he was seeking a different brothel than the one in which he was throttled, stripped, and robbed. Junque and Smith were without benefit of legal counsel and Smith's witnesses, unaware of the trial date, did not appear. The court condemned them to branding and a year's imprisonment in less than five hundred words. The indictment, formally for a non-violent offence, was one of hundreds of its kind that decade marked by assault, knives, and (sometimes) freely flowing blood.In the risks they ran and the things they were ashamed of, the minds of the three are alien to us; in its casual violence, so was the society that enclosed them. Yet this world, gradually, continuously, evolved into one far less tolerant of violence and yet far more protective of an individual's rights-into the world, in other words, of most readers of this volume. How witnesses, victims, and defendants spoke about both facts and norms in the law courts of London shifted, decade by decade, over the course of a hundred and fifty years [2]. This shift in speech paralleled a similar decline in how people behaved towards each other on the street, as the state came, increasingly, to manage its monopoly on violence-part of what is known as the "civilizing process" [3].These changes took place in the decentralized common-law courts, among hundreds of thousands of interacting victims and defendants. Acts of Parliament, sensational crimes, the invention of the criminal defence lawyer-these changed ...

show abstract

“…The first is Russian historiography (2000-2015) of scientific and public-political discourse (works on sociolinguistics and the methodology of socio-humanitarian science in general) [1][2][3]. The second is Anglophone historiography of the scientific and public-political discourse research of the last two decades [4][5][6][7]. The third is AngloAmerican Russian studies, the analysis of which is proposed to assess the relevance of Anglo-American methodological tools for the analysis of Russian 3 Historiography and methodology of modern Russian research on scientific and political discourse…”

Section: Research Sources and Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Knowledge vendors” and “alms-askers”: studying scientific and political discourse in Anglo-American and Russian socio-humanities

Bkeikher

Ageeva

Brazovskaya

et al. 2016

SHS Web of Conferences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. This article analyzes the interaction and mutual influence of the discourse of science and the public authorities in modern Russian and Anglo-American socio-humanities. The aim of the article is to identify the methodological bases of the research on discourse of the public authorities and science in the modern Anglo-American historiography and assessment of their relevance to the analysis of modern Russian administrative and scientific discourse. The authors conducted the analysis of Russian scientific products and revealed a positivist, quantitative bias in the methodology of social sciences, which study scientific and authoritative discourse in modern Russian society. The authors attempted to reflect the diffusion of science and power discourse. By the example of modern Russian realities they illustrated the pattern of how the researches on political discourse and influence of the state order on scientific production are strongly committed to this discourse and cannot go beyond it. An objective study of the experience of Anglo-American Russian studies allows looking at Russian governmental and scientific discourse from the perspective of a new culture, a new empire and a new intellectual history.

show abstract

Lexical shifts, substantive changes, and continuity in State of the Union discourse, 1790–2014

Cited by 136 publications

References 31 publications

Combining natural language processing and network analysis to examine how advocacy organizations stimulate conversation on social media

Combining natural language processing and network analysis to examine how advocacy organizations stimulate conversation on social media

Major Transitions in Political Order

“Knowledge vendors” and “alms-askers”: studying scientific and political discourse in Anglo-American and Russian socio-humanities

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About