The Swedish immigration discourse in traditional media and social media
Abstract
This project will be a continuation of the ongoing project (SNIC 2021/5-537) and our previous cooperation with SNIC in 2020 (SNIC 2020/05-604). We study the immigration debate in Sweden unfolding among the elites and general public, a highly relevant topic in the context of the rapidly changing Swedish political climate. To study the public debate on immigration, the researchers of the Mining for Meaning group employ large-scale text corpora and computational text analysis tools. The combination of the increasingly available textual data sources and rapidly developing NLP methods allow us to study discussions around the topic of immigration in the past two decades with the finest level of granularity. The combination of sociological knowledge and skills in statistics and text data analysis of the project team members puts us in the best position to study the multifaceted phenomena of immigration discourse by employing cutting-edge techniques of computational text analysis. In this project, we plan to finalize our investigations of the factors shaping the collective meanings of immigration in traditional and social media in Sweden. Being equipped with data from the national newspaper archives, textual digital traces from social media and the databases of major events, we are studying the role of inter-media dynamics and disruptive events in shaping the Swedish immigration discourse in the past twenty years.
