A Quantitative Discourse Analysis of Asian Workers in the US Historical
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Jaihyun Park Ryan Cordell
Warning: This paper contains examples of offensive language targetting
marginalized population. The digitization of historical texts invites
researchers to explore the large-scale corpus of historical texts with
computational methods. In this study, we present computational text analysis on
a relatively understudied topic of how Asian workers are represented in
historical newspapers in the United States. We found that the word "coolie" was
semantically different in some States (e.g., Massachusetts, Rhode Island,
Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Arkansas) with the different discourses around coolie.
We also found that then-Confederate newspapers and then-Union newspapers formed
distinctive discourses by measuring over-represented words. Newspapers from
then-Confederate States associated coolie with slavery-related words. In
addition, we found Asians were perceived to be inferior to European immigrants
and subjected to the target of racism. This study contributes to supplementing
the qualitative analysis of racism in the United States with quantitative
discourse analysis.