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Economic history goes digital: topic modeling the Journal of Economic History

Author

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  • Lino Wehrheim

    (Department of History, Economic and Social History, Department of Economics, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany)

Abstract

Digitization and computer science have established a completely new set of methods with which to analyze large collections of texts. One of these methods is particularly promising for economic historians: topic models, i.e., statistical algorithms that automatically infer the content from large collections of texts. In this article, I present an introduction to topic modeling and give an initial review of the research using topic models. I illustrate their capacity by applying them to 2675 articles published in the Journal of Economic History between 1941 and 2016. By comparing the results to traditional research on the JEH and to recent studies on the cliometric revolution, I aim to demonstrate how topic models can enrich economic historians’ methodological toolboxes.

Suggested Citation

  • Lino Wehrheim, 2019. "Economic history goes digital: topic modeling the Journal of Economic History," Cliometrica, Journal of Historical Economics and Econometric History, Association Française de Cliométrie (AFC), vol. 13(1), pages 83-125, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:afc:cliome:v:13:y:2019:i:1:p:83-125
    DOI: 10.1007/s11698-018-0171-7
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Claude Diebolt & Michael Haupert, 2020. "How Cliometrics has Infiltrated Economics – and Helped to Improve the Discipline," Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Economics, History and Political Science, Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, Torino (Italy), vol. 54(1), pages 219-230, June.
    2. Nadia Fernández-de-Pinedo & Alvaro La Parra-Perez & Félix-Fernando Muñoz, 2023. "Recent trends in publications of economic historians in Europe and North America (1980–2019): an empirical analysis," Cliometrica, Journal of Historical Economics and Econometric History, Association Française de Cliométrie (AFC), vol. 17(1), pages 1-22, January.
    3. Wehrheim, Lino, 2021. "The sound of silence: On the (in)visibility of economists in the media," Working Papers 30, German Research Foundation's Priority Programme 1859 "Experience and Expectation. Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour", Humboldt University Berlin.
    4. Daniel Levy & Tamir Mayer & Alon Raviv, 2020. "Academic Scholarship in Light of the 2008 Financial Crisis: Textual Analysis of NBER Working Papers," Working Papers 2020-01, Bar-Ilan University, Department of Economics.
    5. Anselm Küsters, 2022. "Applying Lessons from the Past? Exploring Historical Analogies in ECB Speeches through Text Mining, 1997–2019," International Journal of Central Banking, International Journal of Central Banking, vol. 18(1), pages 277-329, March.
    6. Federico Pablo-Martí & Ángel Alañón-Pardo & Angel Sánchez, 2021. "Complex networks to understand the past: the case of roads in Bourbon Spain," Cliometrica, Journal of Historical Economics and Econometric History, Association Française de Cliométrie (AFC), vol. 15(3), pages 477-534, September.
    7. Mohamed M. Mostafa, 2023. "A one-hundred-year structural topic modeling analysis of the knowledge structure of international management research," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 57(4), pages 3905-3935, August.
    8. Peter Grajzl & Peter Murrell, 2021. "Characterizing a legal–intellectual culture: Bacon, Coke, and seventeenth-century England," Cliometrica, Journal of Historical Economics and Econometric History, Association Française de Cliométrie (AFC), vol. 15(1), pages 43-88, January.
    9. Claude Diebolt & Michael Haupert, 2021. "The Role of Cliometrics in History and Economics," Working Papers of BETA 2021-26, Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg.
    10. David Lenz & Peter Winker, 2020. "Measuring the diffusion of innovations with paragraph vector topic models," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(1), pages 1-18, January.
    11. Levy, Daniel & Mayer, Tamir & Raviv, Alon, 2022. "Economists in the 2008 financial crisis: Slow to see, fast to act," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 60(C).
    12. Küsters Anselm & Andritzky Jochen, 2024. "Welche Rolle spielt das Thema Zukunft im Bundestag?," Wirtschaftsdienst, Sciendo, vol. 104(4), pages 252-257, April.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Economic history; Topic models; Latent Dirichlet allocation; Cliometrics; Digitization; Methodology;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • A12 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Other Disciplines
    • C18 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Methodolical Issues: General
    • N01 - Economic History - - General - - - Development of the Discipline: Historiographical; Sources and Methods

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