通过计算方法分析19世纪美国报纸中'奴隶'与'佣人'的用法差异
A Data-driven Investigation of Euphemistic Language: Comparing the usage of "slave" and "servant" in 19th century US newspapers
- 用Word2vec和对数似然比分析词语语义关联
- 南方报纸用'奴隶'关联法律行政词，北方用'佣人'关联宗教词
- 南北报纸对'奴隶'的描述传播更广，'佣人'则地域性更强
本研究利用计算方法考察19世纪美国报纸中'slave'与'servant'的使用差异。尽管两者均指非裔被奴者，但用法不同。在Chronicling America语料库中，通过FastText嵌入处理可能的OCR错误，并排除文本重印以考虑19世纪的重印文化。采用Word2vec寻找与'slave'和'servant'语义相近的词汇，计算对数似然比以识别南北方报纸中过度使用的论述词。结果发现，'slave'与社会经济、法律及行政词汇相关，而' servant'在北方报纸中与宗教词汇关联，在南方报纸中则与家庭和家务词汇相关。此外，南方报纸中的' slave'话语在北方报纸中更为普遍，而各方的' servant'话语则主要在本地传播。该研究揭示了19世纪美国报纸如何建构关于被奴非裔的不同话语。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
This study investigates the usage of "slave" and "servant" in the 19th century US newspapers using computational methods. While both terms were used to refer to enslaved African Americans, they were used in distinct ways. In the Chronicling America corpus, we included possible OCR errors by using FastText embedding and excluded text reprints to consider text reprint culture in the 19th century. Word2vec embedding was used to find semantically close words to "slave" and "servant" and log-odds ratio was calculated to identify over-represented discourse words in the Southern and Northern newspapers. We found that "slave" is associated with socio-economic, legal, and administrative words, however, "servant" is linked to religious words in the Northern newspapers while Southern newspapers associated "servant" with domestic and familial words. We further found that slave discourse words in Southern newspapers are more prevalent in Northern newspapers while servant discourse words from each side are prevalent in their own region. This study contributes to the understanding of how newspapers created different discourses around enslaved African Americans in the 19th century US.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品；中文卡片由大模型生成，请以原文为准。