Quantifying world geography as seen through the lens of Soviet propaganda

TL;DR

This paper develops a method to quantify geographical biases in media, applying it to Soviet newsreels to reveal how city representation is influenced by size, specialization, and location, uncovering propaganda emphasis patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a mixed quantitative-qualitative approach to measure and interpret geographical biases in historical media data, specifically applied to Soviet propaganda.

Findings

City representation grows super-linearly with size

Biases are influenced by city specialization

Geographical regions are systematically emphasized

Abstract

Cultural data typically contains a variety of biases. In particular, geographical locations are unequally portrayed in media, creating a distorted representation of the world. Identifying and measuring such biases is crucial to understand both the data and the socio-cultural processes that have produced them. Here we suggest to measure geographical biases in a large historical news media corpus by studying the representation of cities. Leveraging ideas of quantitative urban science, we develop a mixed quantitative-qualitative procedure, which allows us to get robust quantitative estimates of the biases. These biases can be further qualitatively interpreted resulting in a hermeneutic feedback loop. We apply this procedure to a corpus of the Soviet newsreel series 'Novosti Dnya' (News of the Day) and show that city representation grows super-linearly with city size, and is further biased by city specialization and geographical location. This allows to systematically identify geographical regions which are explicitly or sneakily emphasized by Soviet propaganda and quantify their importance.