Tracking dogwhistles online and through time using distributional semantics
Max Boholm·Asad Sayeed·Elina Lindgren·Gregor Rettenegger·Robin L. Cooper·Björn Rönnerstrand·Ellen Breitholtz
We present a novel method for tracking the evolution of political dogwhistles—messages which are only understood by a select in-group, while going unnoticed by others (out-group)—in digital environments. Tracking dogwhistles poses a unique empirical challenge due to their reliance on linguistic ambiguity and intentional concealment. To address this, our method combines computational semantics and survey methodology. We model the contextual distribution of dogwhistle terms in online discussion fo