عنوان

Three International Studies Computational Social Science Inquiries Examining Large Corpora of Natural Data

Number

TL51356

.Language of Text, Soundtrack etc

انگلیسی

Title Proper

Three International Studies Computational Social Science Inquiries Examining Large Corpora of Natural Data

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Miller, Daniel Taninecz

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Bachman, David

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

University of Washington

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2019

Text of Note

142 p.

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

University of Washington

Text preceding or following the note

2019

Text of Note

Computational methods provide novel and important approaches for social science inquiries. Due to the ever-increasing availability of large sets, or corpora, of mixed qualitative/quantitative data to the social scientist, algorithmic approaches provide effective opportunities to induce findings about social phenomenon. Here, such approaches are used to analyze three diverse areas of inquiry using related methods. First, energy investment from the People's Republic of China in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is modeled utilizing an open procurement and bidding dataset from within Pakistan. This work posits a series of costly regulatory concessions made by Pakistan to obtain Chinese funding, and suggests an emerging model of Chinese concessionality in foreign lending. Second, propaganda generated on the social media site Twitter by the Russian Federation during the United States' 2016 Presidential Election is inductively modeled and subjected to quantitative sentiment and emotional analysis. This research suggests an information campaign designed to favor several conservative topics, but one that also pushed topic content from across the political spectrum. The Russian disinformation campaign also simultaneously emphasized increased anger within online political discourse. Third, a large original corpus of YouTube comments drawn from the "QAnon" political movement is analyzed. This research indicates a host of novel conjectural characteristics regarding this movement, including that the largest proportion of discussion within the dataset is concerned with the alleged sexual abuse of underaged minors by US political and media actors. This analysis also highlights as yet unexplored international relations beliefs within the movement, and suggests that such discussion is proportionally most concerned with the People's Republic of China. Each of these projects raise numerous questions for further research and also ultimately validate the utilization of inductive algorithms like topic models for future scientific inquiries into social phenomena.

Subject Term

International relations

Subject Term

Political science

Subject Term

Social research

Miller, Daniel Taninecz

Bachman, David

University of Washington

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y