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

Professor Rochelle Terman from the University of Chicago at will speak at the MIT Security Studies Program's Wednesday Seminar.

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.Dr. Austin Long will offer some reflections on the development of US nuclear policy, drawing on his experience as the Joint Staff deputy director, Strategic Stability Strategy, Plans and Policy Directorate within the Department of Defense's Joint Chiefs of Staff.