Decolonisation: meaning, sentiments and implications for heritage

ABSTRACT

Within the printed and online newspaper media in the UK, notions of ‘decolonisation’ referring to various contexts, such as historical, relating to museums and institutions, cultural decolonisation and in relation to modern independence discussions, can be traced. In this article, we have applied topic modelling and natural language processing methods to carry out a classification of, and sentiment analysis on, newspaper headlines and texts from leading British newspapers covering decolonisation over the past decade. The results show an abrupt change in the meaning of decolonisation starting in the middle of the 2010s with an increased focus on cultural and institutional matters, particularly in right-leaning media. Surprisingly, the editorial slant of broadsheets seemingly only had at best moderate effects on tone, while headlines in right-wing tabloids were significantly more negative. Articles covering cultural aspects of decolonisation were substantially more negative than those applying a more traditional, territorial definition of decolonisation. Given the influence of newspaper media on public and private opinions, we discuss the heritage implications of these findings and suggest avenues for further investigation.

KEYWORDS:

• Media
• decolonisation
• topic modelling
• sentiment analysis
• heritage identities

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback, which undoubtedly improved the quality of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While the number of tools and models for analysing different languages increases steadily, English still dominates.

2. Online and offline channels were grouped. Newspapers belonging to the same group, e.g. The Observer and The Guardian were likewise grouped.

3. The poll did not include the Financial Times.

4. Removing capitalisation and punctuation, as well as stop words, stemming words, adding collocations, etc.

5. An abbreviation of ‘Robustly Optimized BERT Approach’.

6. An abbreviation of ‘Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Fund of the University of Antwerp under Grant [48942].

Notes on contributors

Jeroen Cant

Jeroen Cant has a PhD in economics from the University of Antwerp, where he currently works for the Department of Transport and Regional Economics. In his work, he focuses on quantitative methods in economic geography and planning with special attention to the relationship between the built environment and wellbeing. He also has a keen interest in built heritage and its social impacts.

Katelijne Nolet

Katelijne Nolet holds a Masters in Art Sciences and Archaeology. She worked as a heritage professional with volunteers and archaeology hobbyists such as metal detectorists and other collectors as well as professional archaeologists, historians and heritage agency professionals within the Flemish government. The main focus of this work was the MEDEA database (vondsten.be), which is a recording scheme for metal detecting finds. Katelijne currently works as a doctoral researcher in critical heritage studies at the University of Antwerp in which she focuses on art and heritage in private collections in Belgium dating from the Belgian Congo period. More specifically, this research focusses on the sentiments, views and attitudes towards this heritage in different groups and individuals and how these can change or be influenced by recent events and/or public discussion.

Suzie Thomas

Suzie Thomas gained her PhD in Heritage Studies at Newcastle University, UK. She is currently Professor of Heritage at the University of Antwerp. She is interested in the ways in which non-professionals choose to engage with cultural heritage. She also researches and teaches about difficult and controversial heritage issues.