The Topics of Political Economy, a 70 year magazine history Tiago Mata
[email protected] Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London Abstract [c. 200 words]: In the middle decades of the 20th century, when newsmagazines dominated North American print, Newsweek claimed the distinction of hosting the most authoritative commentary on political economy. Newsweek’s columnists were recipients of numerous journalism awards, and two of them received Nobel Prizes in Economics while writing for the magazine. These opinion columns offer a unique vantage point for the study of public economic knowledge. But, how can one read 2,9 million words covering a period of 70 years? Drawing on methods from computational linguistics, I contend that we should examine the topical structure of this corpus. By tracing the birth and death of topics we are able to identify ontological epochs, where the entities of economic life, the subjects of economic science, and the relationships between the two are remade. Word# [10k all incl.]: 9242 December 9, 2014 Work in progress. Please do not cite. The (many) figures of this paper are in colour, please consider to save on printing and to examine them on the screen. Acknowledgments: I am indebted to Claire Lemercier for urging me to consider text analysis in my study of economics in the media. The working paper we co-authored on a subset of the Newsweek corpus was an invaluable education into the statistical methods and the substance of the data. I thank Andrea Salter for research assistance on the processing of the corpus.