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Abstract

In 2013, Singapore’s first riot in 44 years occurred in the racial enclave known as Little India. In response, the Singaporean government spent the next two years debating legislature that ranged from additional security protocols in the neighborhood to broader legislation like the eventually passed Liquor Control Act of 2015. These debates, like others in parliaments around the world, are kept in a repository known as a Hansard – “the official published report od debates in the parliament of a member of the Commonwealth of Nations” (Merriam-Webster). From these repositories, numerous studies explored latent linguistic and semantic elements useful for cultural analysis. A few of these studies employ word embeddings to facilitate closer word-driven analyses, with a smaller number engaging in temporal investigations of the corpus. This paper works to not only extend the literature on the use of word embedding models for the temporal analysis of Hansards but also as a first contribution to a dearth in computationally driven analysis of Singapore’s Hansard. Further, I extracted cultural dimensions of ‘security’ and ‘morality’ and projected selected topics and phrases onto them. To do this, I train a word embedding model on Singapore’s parliamentary speeches from 2012 to 2021, deriving “discourse atoms”, or topics, from said model and using them as reference points for analysis. These results will then be corroborated with textual analysis to communicate a fuller understanding of how exactly these changes are characterized. Overall, I argue that the computational findings point toward an immediate high-level topical response to the riot, that surrounded topics of militarization, inquiry, and disaster. Considered with the textual analysis, the results point toward a shift toward a spatialization of the riot and securitization of the spaces where it occurred in and where its participants, migrant workers, reside and occupy. Further, I argue that this brand of securitization, the securitization of migration, should be more widely used in interrogating government speeches immediately after the riot.

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