Computational Techniques for Analyzing Women’s Social Change in Saudi Newspapers

Abstract

This study utilized computational techniques for a reliable analysis of discourse. These techniques were adopted to analyze the progress of Saudi social change in terms of women’s empowerment within the Saudi transformation program. The data from open source 2021–2022 Saudi newspaper archives were automatically crawled using cutting-edge computational techniques and structured according to the sections of the Saudi newspapers: front page, economy, international, sports, society, culture and religion. The analysis was based on computing the minimally uneven distribution of the relative frequencies of the occurrence of the central word (the Arabic forms of woman and women) from the years 2021 to 2022. This produced two samples of text data, each of which represented the respective years. Calculating the normalized and adjusted frequencies of the central word from each section in the data from each year was important to avoid unbalanced absolute frequencies in the qualitative analysis stage. In addition, dispersion measures showed that the amount of variance in terms of the lexical dispersion of the central word was not high. The observable facts from the quantitative analysis produced a more accurate observational sample of citations, which we qualitatively analyzed. The results of the latter showed a considerable ascending change in favor of empowering women as a consequence of Saudi Vision 2030.

Keywords

• women’s empowerment
• social change
• Saudi newspaper archives
• statistical corpus linguistics
• computational techniques