Looking Back on 60 Years of African Studies in Japan:

Quantitative Text Analysis of Journal of African Studies

Abstract

For almost 60 years, Journal of African Studies (JAS) has been a major medium in Japan for Africanists to publish their academic work. This study performs a series of quantitative investigations of the entire corpus of the journal's first 99 issues (1964-2021). The corpus contains the nearly 650 articles and reports that have been published in these issues. Starting from fairly simple word-level examinations such as counting relevant named entities, the analysis proceeds in an increasingly elaborate and structural direction. In particular, this study applies dynamic topic models (DTM) to the corpus to uncover latent semantic groupings (“topics”) that, in their various mixtures, are presumed to generate the text of each article appearing in JAS. The estimated topics allow largely straightforward interpretation, representing a broad array of academic subjects such as “development,” “literature,” “education,” and “tourism” that have been covered by the journal with a varying degree of intensity. The study thus reveals the whole spectrum of research interests addressed by Africanists in Japan as well as their temporal evolution over the past six decades.