The Nations in Our Minds: Historical Representations of Countries in Google Books

Summary:

Public perceptions and representations of global affairs are central to International Relations (IR) scholarship, yet existing methodologies—such as surveys and media analysis—face temporal and coverage constraints. In this paper, we introduce a new, comprehensive dataset of country representations in millions of English-language books over 120 years. Harnessing the massive Google Books Ngram Corpus and cutting-edge text-as-data methods, we track the distribution of attention and meaning attached to 256 countries in both American and British print culture from 1900 to 2019. We measure both the frequency of country mentions and the semantic associations attached to them using dynamic word embeddings. Our analysis reveals enduring and evolving discursive frames—such as China’s association with growth/decline and Russia’s with grand strategy—demonstrating the persistence of country images in American public discourses. We validate our measures against established benchmarks and highlight their utility for studying international reputation, status, and public discourse. By expanding the temporal and substantive scope of text-based IR research, this study provides a valuable resource for examining long-term trends in public perceptions of global affairs and international relations.
 

Bio:

Rochele Terman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She specializes in international relations, with an emphasis on international norms, human rights, and the Muslim world. Her first book, The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works—and When It Backfires, was published in 2023 with Princeton University Press.