Is it about “them”? leveraging big data research to understand anti-immigrant discourse

Abstract

The paper explores the potential of big data analytics for researching anti-immigrant discourse. We emphasize contextualization as an essential element of research and follow a hybrid approach inspired by best practices of computational content analysis, combining human hermeneutic expertise with supervised machine learning to classify a corpus of comments in online news communities in Singapore over 6 months ( N = 399,225). The paper highlights how big data analytics can provide a nuanced and critical apprehension of immigrant-related discourse in large social media datasets.