# A Data-driven Investigation of Euphemistic Language: Comparing the usage of "slave" and "servant" in 19th century US newspapers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15057 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15057/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [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)
- [Roles for Computing in Social Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04883/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Locating the Leading Edge of Cultural Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15068/) (2024)
- [A Quantitative Discourse Analysis of Asian Workers in the US Historical Newspapers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02572/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.