2017 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Rethinking Public Reporting: Corpus Linguistic Analysis of ODA Evaluation Reports
| Project/Area Number |
17K17674
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| Research Institution | The University of Tokyo |
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Principal Investigator |
Maemura Yu 東京大学, 大学院工学系研究科(工学部), 助教 (60743854)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2017-04-01 – 2019-03-31
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| Keywords | ODA / corpus linguistics / discourse analysis / project documents / foreign aid policy |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
A comprehensive database of JICA project documents has been compiled through targeted downloads of public information from the JICA website, as well as through two field visits to the OECD archives located in the Paris Headquarters.
Preliminary analytical results of the compiled corpus has been presented to JICA practitioners and researchers in a presentation entitled "Japanese Development Aid from the Perspective of DAC: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of OECD-DAC Documents". The preliminary analysis has validated the methodological approach of corpus analysis for examining JICA documentation. Frequency lists and latent semantic analysis of archived memorandums and peer reviews drafted by the OECD Development Assistance Committee (describing and evaluating Japan's aid policies and practices) have revealed basic patterns that characterize the historical development of foreign aid practices in Japan amongst DAC countries. For example, Japanese aid as War "reparations" can be seen in policy documents up to 1971, while industry-specific keywords such as "fisheries" prevalent up to the early 1980s drops from prominence in 1982. In contrast, mentions of specific Asian counterparts remain relatively stable across the entire 30-year span from 1965 to 1995.
A refined qualitative analysis into the context of the identified patterns will provide a more meaningful discussion into the historical development of Japanese foreign aid from within peer-review and policy evaluation documents.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
The current research project has benefited greatly through a separate but related collaborative research project being conducted with the JICA Research Institute (JICA-RI). The primary investigator is also involved in a project at the JICA-RI to write a background paper for a historical analysis of Japanese ODA policy. Through this JICA-RI project, the investigator was able to obtain valuable policy documents directly from the archives located at the OECD headquarters. These documents were processed and cleaned in order to conduct a preliminary corpus linguistic analysis. In this manner, the aims to develop a linguistic model that can observe the relationship between JICA documents and development aid practices is still well within reach.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
Preliminary research results have been generated, but much of the collected data (on specific projects and policy documents) must be cleaned and refined in order to carry out a systematic analysis of the observable linguistic patterns.
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| Causes of Carryover |
One of the planned attendances to an international conference was not implemented as the abstract was not accepted (Language Resources and Evaluation Conference). Other expenses have yet to be used such as "other" consumables and remuneration to research assistants for data-entry. These expenditures have been shifted into the second year of the project.
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Research Products
(1 results)
