A New Approach to Identifying Ethnicity-Related Keywords in News Articles

The final speaker in this final Friday session tab ECREA 2022 is Stefanie Walter, whose interest is in discovering inclusive keywords related to ethnicity and race. Minority groups are often framed negatively in the news, and this reinforces negative opinions and beliefs about them; but research into such framing is also difficult because it depends in the first place on the use of keywords and search strings for identifying relevant news articles.

The identification of such terms thus often depends on the researchers’ tacit knowledge, and may miss speciality terms like the UK’s ‘Windrush generation’ of Caribbean immigrants, while it may also pick up on key terms that are used in other contexts where they are not referring to ethnic groups. The present project tried various combinations of terms referring to ethnic groups and human beings to explore this, and found ways to improve the detection of relevant articles. It has now released the R package ‘rKeywords’ on GitHub that implements these new approaches.