Text-as-Data, Archives, and Diplomacy

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The unifying theme of this panel is text-as-data analytic methods applied to historical materials. The ripple effects of the digital revolution on the study of historical International Relations (IR) continue to widen. One critical change is the availability of large collections of previously classified government material. While historians and political scientists have long used qualitative analytic methods to assess such collections, innovations in the last two decades in text-as-data and machine learning-based analysis has created new possibilities for systematically classifying and analyzing the archival content. Moreover, optimal-character recognition and the increasing availability of born-digital documents makes such analysis increasingly accurate.

This panel combines attentiveness to history in the study of world politics with new methods of analysis. Each paper collects digitized archival materials and uses techniques for text extraction and pattern analysis as a way to more systematically assess textual content. An additional commonality among the papers is some focus on the United States. While focusing on different substantive policy issues and temporal periods, American foreign policy is a central feature of each.

The proposed panel also features interesting sources of diversity on several dimensions. Two are especially important. First, each of the four papers analyzes a different historical question, allowing the papers to speak to several major research programs in International Relations. The topics range from presidential style (Carson) to grand strategic purpose (Allan and Bagozzi) to diplomatic trust (Baggott Carter) to war termination (Min). Second, the four papers feature diversity in the kinds of primary historical materials to be used. Baggott Carter uses archival diplomatic materials on the US and China Allan and Bagozzi collate and analyze declassified American material from across the national security bureaucracy in the form of the Foreign Relations of the United States series. Two other papers –those by Min and Carson – build and analyze corpuses which are more specific and which are produced in daily intervals. Min uses daily military reports during the Korean War to assess war termination and bargaining processes. Carson uses daily intelligence briefings to the American president to assess presidential style and the divergence between public and private knowledge.

The proposed panel’s core contributions are two-fold: building interest in historical work in IR that draws on text-as-data approaches and contributing to core substantive IR debates on diplomacy, war termination, state purpose, leaders, and intelligence.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 43: International History and Politics

Chair

• Bear F. Braumoeller Ohio State University

Discussants

• Clara H. Suong New York University

• Sarah Bouchat Northwestern University

Individual Presentations

• Purposes and Interests in American Foreign Policy: The FRUS Series as Data - Bentley B. Allan, Johns Hopkins University; Benjamin E. Bagozzi, University of Delaware

• A View from the Oval Office: Insights from the Presidential Daily Brief, 1961-77 - Austin Carson, University of Chicago

• Small Events in High Politics: Diplomacy and Cooperation in US-China Relations - Erin Baggott Carter, University of Southern California

• Computational Archival Analysis in Studying International Conflict - Eric Min, UCLA