Introducing the Mapping Military Intellectual History Project Alpha Version Ian Reynolds & Ozan Cetin – American University School of International Service Introduction By means of introducing Mapping Military Intellectual History Project ’s (MMIHP) alpha version, we felt it would be helpful to offer a description of the project’s roots, a brief case study demonstrating current capabilities, and finally, short description of the project’s future goals. What’s the Point? The MMIHP’s goal is to help researchers and students learn and explore how concepts, phrases, technologies, or other items of interest in military history track across time within mili t ary and defense publications . But why would this even matter? We see this project as resting three pillars related tho this question. 1) Scholars of war and international security have shown us that manners in which militar y and defense organizations understand war and security can be important factors in shaping its conduct. In order t o fully study the application of military power, it is important to engage with the broader social milieu that ideas about ‘successful’ war emerge from 2) S ocial theorists as well as empirical researche rs have argued that language is a vehicle for how people e xpress shared ideas, visions of the world, acting as a both constraining and enabling factor for the imaginable and the possible. In this sense, mapping the use of language can provide important insights for how humanity goes about conducting its business, including in the context of war and conflict 3) Contemporary computing technologies now allow researchers to explore how language frames our world through the analysis of large text data sets. These capabilities researchers to augment ( not replace ) the tra ditional means of analyzing texts which rely on deep reading and engagement. Accordingly, computational text analysis techniques can help researchers track how concepts develop over time, which rhetorical frames might have the most salience, and a range of other analysis tasks that can be taken on at large - scale These three factors underly our broader goals for the project and structure our vision for the application’s utility. We see the MMIHP as helping provide an open - source avenue for students and rese archers to add historical context to pressing research questions involving security, war, and politics, and even help to inductively generate new avenues for future research projects. What Can the App Currently Do? This is a very basic version of eventual plans for the applications functionality. That said, we still think it provides some use for students and researchers even in its current state Below, we provide a short demonstration of what the app can currently do. But first, it is help to offer a short description of the data and results you will see below. The app currently is limited around 1,500 issues of digitized U.S. professional military journals dating back to the year 1950 and running until 2021. Thes e issues are collected from digitized archives of four different journals spanning various elements of the U.S. military and include Naval War College Review , Military Review , Air University Review , and Joint Force Quarterly . As we detail below, there are plans to expand the current data set to include additional documents from the U.S. and other countries. The broader the sources we can collect from, the more interesting results and comparisons will be. The results plotted below are calculated as the frequency of the search term you enter ( Figure 1 ) per year, divided by total words used in that year You will also notice that you can also adjust the search bar to include different time ranges of interest. Figure 1: Search Term Box Again, this is just the base function of the app, but it still provides some interesting results. For example, we can see that trajectory of the word Soviet in the combined data set plotted in Figure 2 As we see in the plot, around the year 1980, the word Soviet made up just over 0.6 percent of words used in the corpus , eventually falling off as the Cold War era dissapated Figure 2: Plotted Results for ‘Soviet’ With the basics taken care of, let ’ s jump into a quick case study starting with a simple test to see if our result outputs seem valid at face value. Note that because the app is currently limited to U.S. military journals, our case will be necessarily U.S. centric. We base our validity te st on three locations of U.S. military intervention in the past fifty years. Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. In its current stage, the app allows for the input of multiple search terms that will plot simultaneously. Each term should be separate by a comma as shown below in Figure 3. Each search term will be plotted in a different color with a legend located at the top of the plot. Figure 3: Multiple Search Terms Results depicted in Figure 4 show that the dates of these conflicts correspond with spikes in the rate of use of each country in the data set . For example, the U.S. officially sent ground troops into Vietnam in 1965 [fact check] , in which we see a substantial spike in term’s rate of use in journal articles. Similar spikes in term use occur for both Iraq and Afghanistan. For Iraq, this is true for both the era of the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq over inaccurate concerns of WMD and connections to the terrorist organization Al Qaeda. In the case o f Afghanistan, we see a spike in term use following the U.S. invasion as a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Thus, plotted results match up with face value expectations. Figure 4: Plotting U.S. Military Interventions Yet even in this simple example, we can begin to generate a broader question about intellectual trends within the U.S defense architecture. All three conflicts included in the plot are linked to both tactics of counterinsurgency and dynamics between great powers fighting smaller, ‘less powerful’, states/organizations. The ten most recent years depict a decline in use rates of each state. What could be a factor in these correlations? W e cannot offer any full explanation or account of these trends here, tha t said, adding an additional plot to the line may offer a possible path to dig into further. As we see in Figure 5 the decline in focus on countries which represent U.S. attempts at counter - insurgency effort/counter terrorism efforts is matched by a stark rise in the focus on China. While these results are simply correlational, they do map on to general ongoing policy discussions in Washington of a ‘shift’ towards a focus on great power competition and the Indo - Pacific region. Thus, what we may be observing is an empirical demonstration of the degree that conflicts and military strategies/tactics of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are being usurped in favor of re - prioritized discussions Figure 5: Adding China to the Mix At this stage in the app’s development , we can also explore linguistic trends in prominent technologies. For example, discussions around AI and autonomous weapons currently pose important strategic and moral questions. We can use even this simple version of the app to see how certain words that frame such discussions catch on. For example, words like automated, autonomous, AI, and automate ( Figure 6 ) , display similar usage trends up until around 2015, only autonomous and AI take off above the other terms. What might be driving this shift? Like our prior example, this is not the place for a broad accounting of the reasons behind these shifts. The point is that even in its most simple form, the application is a useful tool for illustrating disjunctures in the use of lang uage in military journals currently included in the data set. Figure 6: Explore Technological Trends What Does the Future Look Like? With the basic s of the application covered, we would also like to take a moment to review plans for developing more comprehensive functionality down the line. First, coming versions of the app will feature a greater range of documentation to explore and extend further b ack into time. Additionally, we plan to add more search filters that will allow users to compare trends in the document sources. For example, how do discussions of certain locations or technologies differ in two separate military journals? These types of q uestions should be answerable in future versions. Moreover, on top of including additional military journals and doctrine/training documents from the United States, we plan on adding digitized content from other countries. The plan is to add to the app wh atever we can get our hands on. For example, cross national comparisons will hopefully become a possibility as we expand the current database further. Through such additions we hope to make MMIHP a globally inclusive project. Documents from the United Stat es simply represented a convenient , yet limited, starting point. On top of additional data, we plan on expanding the computational techniques available to users. This includes extending search capabilities to multi - word phrases and integrating the capabil ity for users to build their own targeted search dictionaries to track constellations of words that might better capture a concept of interest. [Additional items??]