IQSS Presenters at Annual Text as Data Conference Discuss Diplomacy, Censorship, and More

October 17, 2014
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The Fifth Annual "New Directions in Text as Data" conference took place in Chicago, on October 10 and 11. As one of the co-hosting institutions (with the London School of Economics and Northwestern University), IQSS supported several affiliated scholars who presented papers and otherwise participated. The meeting provided a glimpse of cutting edge text methods being used to solve practical issues in politics, policy and beyond. Some 65 researchers from various disciplines attended, representing universities from around the world.

Brandon Stewart (coauthoring with IQSS alumna Margaret Roberts of UCSD), introduced research on the nature of propaganda in China. Using a massive new dataset of local newspapers, their paper showed that the Chinese government uses two strategies—localization and coordination—to simultaneously stop sensitive stories from spreading, and to ensure that citizens have limited access to alternative viewpoints when such stories have high public profiles.

harvard_at_textconference_cropArthur Spirling, Director of the Program on Text Research at IQSS, presented a paper coauthored with Michael Gill on the recent Wikileaks Cable disclosure. Their research suggests that there were at least two types of secrecy inherent in diplomatic communication: a 'substantive' dimension, that hides information that might directly threaten national interests and a more subtle 'procedural' dimension, dealing with the important norm of confidentiality in diplomatic meetings.

Konstantin Kashin and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez presented their paper, "Capturing Business Power Across the States with Text Reuse," that studies the role of ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) in influencing US state legislators in terms of their bill drafting choices. They showed that, on average, such influence is more likely in places with less professional legislatures and that it has real world effects on tax rates and income inequality.

The conference agenda, including links to many of the papers presented, may be found here:5th Annual Text as Data Conference