Week 6: Dictionary Applications and Initial Analysis

Welcome to my latest installment where I will go over the most recent findings that I have as well as what I plan to do going forward. This past week, I have been working on analyzing President Biden and President Trump’s debate text from 2020 and looking at some of the differences between the Presidents.

First we have to analyze the data. Over the past few weeks, I have collected and stored both Biden and Trump texts that I will be using in .txt files. These .txt files make it easy to run my scoring program on and are easily modifiable. Once these files are in our Colab notebook which is an environment in which we can run data mining techniques, we must also look at our dictionaries.

Our dictionaries for each of the 5 moral foundations are a key part of our analysis section. To build these dictionaries, I used a number of social science techniques. The first is an expert based dictionary building which is a practice in which individuals confer amongst each other on political rhetoric and see which words are most relevant to each pillar. Last summer, two other students and I conducted similar research into other public officials in Congress and we developed a dictionary with the help of our mentors as well. Another approach is using LLM’s (Large Language Models) to develop these dictionaries. These LLM’s are especially useful because we can synthesize a number of words that are related to a pillar relatively fast. For my dictionary, I used more of an expert-based approach but also took into account some words from our Large Language Models.

After applying our dictionaries, we have the ability to analyze our presidents. The first pair of Presidential candidates I took were our most recent from 2020, President Biden and President Trump. After importing all the required packages, I ran our dictionary against our text files for President Biden. From our initial numbers, President Trump had a higher authority score of 0.221932 compared to Biden’s 0.121917. The other pillars would swing between the two Presidents however this initial data on authority is promising. In week 7 I will be looking at this data more in depth as well as other presidential candidates.