Feeling like a State. The Sentiments Tide of Swiss Diplomacy through the Eye of the Algorithm

André Ourednik,Stefan Nellen,Guido Koller,Peter Fleer

doi:10.2478/adhi-2018-0044

Abstract

Abstract Can emotions be observed throughout the years at the regional scale of continents and countries? Does variation in their intensity correlate with historical events and with the evolution of diplomatic and administrative practices? If so, who is the subject of emotion? We seek answers by a remote reading analysis of the reports of Swiss ambassadors in the first half of the 20th century. We examine the conditions under which super-individual subjects of emotion can be aggregated from large textual datasets, and propose a theoretical framework for their interpretation. In specific examples, we show how algorithmic sentiment analysis let us identify the exceptionally expressive language of the Swiss ambassador in Tokyo during World War 2, or the posture of the Swiss administration with regard to the social movements in Scandinavia. Our findings yield both methodological recommendations and theoretical bridges between various disciplines concerned with emotions and their expression in written documents.

Highlights

Prior to all analysis in this paper, we reject the idea of any single origin of emotions; our basic posture is to consider them at the interface of a plurality of origins and scales of reality, ranging from the individual to the global context, from the immediate event to the long timescale of biological evolution
Other problems of unigram lexicon-based textual sentiment analysis (TSA) include negation handling: on 13 February 1922, for instance, the Swiss ambassador in Stockholm wrote that the Scandinavians »suffer from the economic crisis as much as us, and we cannot pretend that we are happy«;50 the word ›heureux‹ does appear but means its opposite
We observe variations in sentiment expression over the course of time, which correlate with historical events

Summary

Introduction

By analysing a set of historical documents produced by the Swiss administration in the first half of the 20th century, we ask whether emotions can be observed throughout the years at the regional scale of continents and countries.[1] We ask whether variation in their expression and intensity correlates with historical events[2] and the evolution of diplomatic and administrative practices. The novelty of this line of questioning lies in spanning several fields of research and implies both methodological and theoretical reflexivity to contain its historical object. The question is whether the language of these texts allows detection of statistically meaningful sentiments

A State of Practice in Sentiment Analysis

A French sentiment lexicon

Global Results and Interpretation where:

Discussion

Pietro Gerbore

20 Florian Keller