Title
Measuring Social Change Using Text Data: A Simple Distributional Approach
Abstract
This paper proposes a simple approach to measuring social change using text data. The approach is based on the idea that any significant change in a society should affect the distribution of the words used in the society. Essentially we use the total variation distance between the distributions of words in adjacent months as a measure of social change during the latter month. Based on text data from the Nikkei Newspaper from 1989 to 2015, the largest social change observed in Japan during this period took place in March 2011, the month of the Great East Japan Earthquake.
Inquiries
Takashi KAMIHIGASHI
Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration,
Kobe University
Rokkodai-cho, Nada-ku, Kobe
657-8501 Japan
Phone: +81-78-803-7036
FAX: +81-78-803-7059
Kazuhiro SEKI
Faculty of Intelligence and Informatics, Konan University
and
Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration,
Kobe University
Rokkodai-cho, Nada-ku, Kobe
657-8501 Japan
Phone: +81-78-803-7036
FAX: +81-78-803-7059
Masahiko SHIBAMOTO
Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration,
Kobe University
Rokkodai-cho, Nada-ku, Kobe
657-8501 Japan
Phone: +81-78-803-7036
FAX: +81-78-803-7059
Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration,
Kobe University
Rokkodai-cho, Nada-ku, Kobe
657-8501 Japan
Phone: +81-78-803-7036
FAX: +81-78-803-7059
Kazuhiro SEKI
Faculty of Intelligence and Informatics, Konan University
and
Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration,
Kobe University
Rokkodai-cho, Nada-ku, Kobe
657-8501 Japan
Phone: +81-78-803-7036
FAX: +81-78-803-7059
Masahiko SHIBAMOTO
Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration,
Kobe University
Rokkodai-cho, Nada-ku, Kobe
657-8501 Japan
Phone: +81-78-803-7036
FAX: +81-78-803-7059