I am invited to present a new approach to comparative text analysis in a research seminar at Waseda Universtiy (Tokyo) on 17th. My talk is titled Data-driven approach to bilingual text analysis: representation of US foreign policy in Japanese and British newspapers in 1985-2016.
Kohei Watanabe will present a new approach to text analysis of historical data in a research project on media representation of US foreign policy (with Prof. Peter Trubowitz). In this project, he analyses how Japanese and British newspapers covered US government’s commitment to its most important allies during the last 30 years. Taking Asahi Shimbun and London Times as examples, he will demonstrate techniques to redefine word boundaries and to expand keyword dictionaries with statistical models trained on a large news corpus. These techniques are equally applicable to both Japanese and English texts, improving overall accuracy and comparability of analytical results. The techniques to be presented are widely accessible in quanteda, a quantitative text analysis package in R, which he develops as one of the main contributors.