East Asian Linguistics Workshop: "Public Political Discourse of the Japanese Diaspora: Findings and Challenges of Historical Corpus Semantics," Andrew P. Nelson

Abstract:

In this project, I develop a model for querying word frequencies in the Hoji Shimbun Japanese Diaspora newspaper collection in order to trace occurrences of politically-related terms over the period from 1895 to 1935. The project leverages a corpus of over 623 million words extracted from over 400,000 pages of text from 10 newspapers published in San Francisco, Beijing/Dalian, Honolulu, and São Paolo. I present my methods for evaluating the accuracy of existing OCR methods, assessing the reliability of word counts, and for interpreting trends in word frequency shifts.

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Andrew Patrick Nelson is a PhD Candidate in the Japanese Linguistics track of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, with PhD minors in History and Linguistics. His work brings together methods in psycholinguistics, semantics, and pragmatics in analyzing texts on language written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with Japanese texts as a primary case study, but also leveraging sources in English, French, and German for a transnational perspective. He was a 2021-22 Digital Humanities Graduate Fellow with the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University.