I showcase here textual and visual gems of a geek mixed methods ethnography in political science and sociology, focusing mainly on educated youth, representation and political becoming in contemporary India. The repository gravitates around a monograph in preparation on campus activism and Indian democracy, and introduces the curated material of an archival exhibition on student politics. I have a growing interest in text analysis and the study of populist speeches. Content is open access.
§︎ Research foci
• Youth activism as political self-fashioning
• Political archives and the pamphleteers
• Populist style as political representation
• Political intermediaries, elites and subalterns
• Ethnography of political ambition in India
• Text analysis, speeches and lifeworlds
§︎ Contents
• Publications: articles · preprints · op-eds
• Collaborations: ceri · iiit-d · icas-mp
• Datasets: parcha · dips
• Curation: memories of change
• Syllabi: sciences po · king's · cemis
• Code: r · python
• Photography: fieldword photos
• E-library: nonfiction
What constitutes a convincing expressions of political connect, relatedness and commonness? Exploring Narendra Modi’s Mann ki baats, we suggest that part of the answer lays in the overlapping lexical and stylistic realm of Modi and another set of audience-pullers: spiritual gurus.
We hypothesize that populism relies on a mimesis of the putative people as a metaphor of the majority. It requires anti-elitism to be complemented by a people-leaders’ identification abolishing the symbolic distance between the represented and the representative.
This is the replication file of the draft manuscript submitted to the American Political Science Review. It is titled ‘Aping the People’: Populist Identification as Mimesis in Narendra Modi’s Speeches. The SMUR version of the article is found above.
This essay uses a natural language processing model trained on a large database of speeches from Prime Ministers since 1946 to generate analytically intelligible answers to a much-debated question: what is the idea of India?
This presentation at the TCPD centre of Ashoka University aims at mapping Indian Prime Ministers’s speeches and their affinities with populism, by comparing them to seemingly non-political actors: religious gurus and policy planners.
The management of the coronavirus spread is not only a global rupture, it also signals the consolidation of the personalistic and intimate rapport between Modi and the people, which routinizes direct populist appeals through disfiguring democratic institutions.
You can find here a range of datasets of textual rendering of speeches, writings and pamphlets of Indian politicians, student activists, historical figures, administrators and religious gurus involved in the making of contemporary India.
Scripts to batch process textual data for analysis in R, Python, TXM and IRaMuTeQ. The repo contains tools to extract text – and its metadata – from digital sources (PDFs, HTML, SRT), clean it (layout and OCR corrections) and format it in a CSV+TXT format for analysis.
Most speeches of Narendra Modi are found on the Narendra Modi website, on the Press Information Bureau and on the PM India website. However, some of the campaign speeches, mostly in Hindi and Gujarati…
These are preparatory sketches prior to the making of the figures of the draft article “Aping the People”: A Text Analysis of Populist Mimesis in Narendra Modi Speeches. A copy of the final figures are available on the…
Here can be found the R markdown script of the article in preparation “Aping the People”: A Text Analysis of Populist Mimesis in Narendra Modi Speeches. Here you can run the results of the text analysis…
The python script generates the multilevel dictionary (1:5 levels) in both YML and LIWC formats from a CSV file. An example of required CSV formatting can be found below the code section.
The DATA project intends to facilitate computer-assisted textual analysis of political discourses in India. It aims at developing a range of semi-automated management tools in Python/R. They are designed at structuring large quantities of text…