Shaul Shenhav

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Political Science, Faculty Member

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I am an associate professor at the Department of Political Science, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My research interests include political narratives, political discourse, rhetorical criticism and Israeli politics. My personal webpage: https://scholars.huji.ac.il/shaulshenhav
Supervisors: Yaron Ezrahi

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Thin and thick narrative analysis

Narrative Inquiry, Sep 28, 2005

The article explores how we can define the concept of political narrative and looks at the implic... more The article explores how we can define the concept of political narrative and looks at the implications in terms of analyzing political discourse. The examination of the various strategies used to define narrative, leads to the suggestion that, at least in the context of political narrative analysis, we need structural definitions that stress the barest minimum for terming a message a narrative. Basing on the proposed strategy to define narrative, the article suggests that narrative analysis should operate on two levels: the “thin” level and the “thick” level. The thin level relates to events and situations described in a discourse and their order of appearance in the text. “Thick level” of analysis, relates to everything included in the “narration” and the relation between the components of the thin narrative. The article examines these two levels of analysis in the context of a short statement by Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, at a photo opportunity in the White House. The analysis demonstrates how to apply a combination of thin and thick analysis to political discourse, and how this dual perspective makes a contribution to the study of spatial construction in narratives.

Leveraging Researcher Domain Expertise to Annotate Concepts Within Imbalanced Data

Communication Methods and Measures, Feb 22, 2023

Detecting stories

Journal of Language and Politics, Dec 13, 2007

The article argues that notwithstanding politicians’ desire to conceal from the public parts of t... more The article argues that notwithstanding politicians’ desire to conceal from the public parts of the content of their indoor discussions, we nevertheless find ‘traces’ of their closed door debates in their public addresses.The article suggests that we need to regard at least some of these traces as an inevitable part of the process of constructing political discourse. It provides a comparative analysis of in-camera and public political discourse in Israel, suggesting techniques for identifying unintentional disclosure of information. These techniques are applied to cases drawn from Israeli politics in which politicians have sought to conceal information in public and semi-public forums. Such scrutiny can not only help to sharpen our discernment of the hidden voices in political discourse, but also to understand a crucial mechanism for the construction of borders between confidential and public political discourse.

Clause Analysis: Using Syntactic Information to Automatically Extract Source, Subject, and Predicate from Texts with an Application to the 2008–2009 Gaza War

Political Analysis, Mar 1, 2017

This article presents a new method and open source R package that uses syntactic information to a... more This article presents a new method and open source R package that uses syntactic information to automatically extract source-subject-predicate clauses. This improves on frequency based text analysis methods by dividing text into predicates with an identified subject and optional source, extracting the statements and actions of (political) actors as mentioned in the text. The content of these predicates can be analyzed using existing frequency based methods, allowing for the analysis of actions, issue positions and framing by different actors within a single text. We show that a small set of syntactic patterns can extract clauses and identify quotes with good accuracy, significantly outperforming a baseline system based on word order. Taking the 2008-2009 Gaza war as an example, we further show how corpus comparison and semantic network analysis applied to the results of the clause analysis can show differences in citation and framing patterns between U.S. and English-language Chinese coverage of this war.

Shaul Shenhav

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