# A Quantitative Discourse Analysis of Asian Workers in the US Historical Newspapers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02572 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02572/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [A Systematic Media Frame Analysis of 1.5 Million New York Times Articles from 2000 to 2017](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01803/) (2020)
- [Abolitionist Networks: Modeling Language Change in Nineteenth-Century Activist Newspapers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07538/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Data-driven Investigation of Euphemistic Language: Comparing the usage of "slave" and "servant" in 19th century US newspapers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15057/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.