Noah Milstein Text-as-Data Blog Post-1: Project Idea Currently I am considering two different research questions and their associated datasets and methods. The first of these would involve a text scrape and analysis of posts on the message board r/guns Firearms and Related Articles, this message board specializes in posts involving users’ guns and, in general, captions describing them. I would scrape these for general linguistic content and the descriptions users give involving their guns. I would then scrape another repository of language involving firearms from manufacturers websites and advertising material. I would then compare these two sources and see how the prevailing language differs between manufacturers and consumers. This would allow me to explore the research question of how stated intended use and description by manufacturers differs from the language of consumers.
There is some prior research on this topic, however most involves the specific language of firearm advertising, especially in print literature. In The Marketing of Guns to Women: Factors Influencing Gun-Related Attitudes and Gun Ownership by Women, the authors text code a number of print advertisements to discern methods of targeting advertisements to women. Witkowski applies a similar approach to advertisements in Guns for Christmas: Advertising in Boys’ Life Magazine, text coding articles to distinguish their method of targeted consumers. Reddit threads involving firearms have not appeared in any specific research that I could identify though a great deal of research exists involving reddit scraping as a discipline and method of research. Proferes et. al published a “systematic analysis of 727 manuscripts that used Reddit as a data source,” (Proferes) so a great deal of research looks at threads as a source of information, especially by extracting data through text coding. For this research question there is prior research in terms of methods and the exploration of reddit threads that could be pulled from. My second research idea would be to extract text data from wikipedia in order to facilitate a project involving networks of war in wikipedia articles, for the case of text coding I am specifically interested in the citations in the wikipedia articles and the nationality and publishers of the authors. The research question I am specifically trying to answer is whether or not networks of war and the overall trend of centralization in the wars in wikipedia’s “List of wars: 1000–1499 - Wikipedia” through the modern era to see if the centralization of cited authors matches the centralization of the wars themselves. This would be to look for overall bias or European centrality in the history of conflict. The text coding would primarily involve scraping wikipedia for tables and information.
Blair, M. Elizabeth, and Eva M. Hyatt. “The Marketing of Guns to Women: Factors Influencing Gun-Related Attitudes and Gun Ownership by Women.” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, vol. 14, no. 1, American Marketing Association, 1995, pp. 117–27.
Dawson, J. Shall not be infringed: how the NRA used religious language to transform the meaning of the Second Amendment. Palgrave Commun 5, 58 (2019).
Proferes, Nicholas, et al. “Studying Reddit: A Systematic Overview of Disciplines, Approaches, Methods, and Ethics.” Social Media + Society, Apr. 2021.
Saylor EA, Vittes KA, Sorenson SB. Firearm advertising: product depiction in consumer gun magazines. Eval Rev. 2004 Oct;28(5):420-33.
Witkowski TH. Guns for Christmas: Advertising in Boys’ Life Magazine, 1911-2012. Journal of Macromarketing. 2020;40(3):396-414.
Yamane, D., Yamane, P. & Ivory, S.L. Targeted advertising: documenting the emergence of Gun Culture 2.0 in Guns magazine, 1955–2019. Palgrave Commun 6, 61 (2020).