A Century of Immigrant Incorporation: Corpus Analysis of Etiquette Books to Uncover Stability and Change in Representation, Sentiment, and the Ordinariness of Immigrants

Andrea Voyer, Stockholm University
Zachary D. Kline, University of Connecticut
Madison Danton, University of Connecticut
Tatiana Volkova, Stockholm University

The goal of this article is to contribute to the growing literature on mainstream shifts in the wake of immigration by using computational social scientific tools to examine the changing representation of immigrant groups in the social “mainstream.” Analyzing a corpus of etiquette books published between 1922 and 2017, we examine three elements of mainstream shifts: 1. the representation of different immigrant groups through naming and salience to the texts; 2. the positive and negative sentiments associated with different immigrant groups; and 3. the placement of different immigrant groups on a semantic dimension represented by the poles of “normal” and “strange.” Our preliminary results show the gradual adaptation and adjustment of the social mainstream as a result of immigrant integration, with some caveats. We observe increased representations of immigrants as named person entities in the texts, but these changes are quite recent and are dwarfed by the continuing dominance of white, Anglo-American names. We observe declining negative sentiment for all immigrant groups over time, but with differences that we interpret to reflect group-specific historical, political, and cultural circumstances, including persistently less positivity associated with non-white immigrants. Finally, semantic shifts in the text demonstrate that most immigrants move from an association with “strange” and toward associations as “normal” in the texts, although continued ambiguity is attached to “Muslim.” These findings provide a new source of information that both corroborates the reality of mainstream shifts in light of immigration and also reveals the persistence of racialized exclusions and the ongoing reality of immigrant integration as a form of “working toward whiteness” (Roediger 2018). The research techniques we develop can be adapted to other studies of historical change related to representation, social sentiment, and symbolic inclusion in the social mainstream.

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 Presented in Session 146. New Constructs, Old Data, and Incorporating Immigrants