This study investigates the usage of "slave" and "servant" in the 19th century US newspapers using computational methods. While both terms were used to refer to enslaved African Americans, they were used in distinct ways. In the Chronicling America corpus, we included possible OCR errors by using FastText embedding and excluded text reprints to consider text reprint culture in the 19th century. Word2vec embedding was used to find semantically close words to "slave" and "servant" and log-odds ratio was calculated to identify over-represented discourse words in the Southern and Northern newspapers. We found that "slave" is associated with socio-economic, legal, and administrative words, however, "servant" is linked to religious words in the Northern newspapers while Southern newspapers associated "servant" with domestic and familial words. We further found that slave discourse words in Southern newspapers are more prevalent in Northern newspapers while servant discourse words from each side are prevalent in their own region. This study contributes to the understanding of how newspapers created different discourses around enslaved African Americans in the 19th century US.

翻译：本研究采用计算方法，考察了19世纪美国报纸中“奴隶”与“仆人”两个词汇的使用情况。尽管这两个术语都曾被用来指代被奴役的非裔美国人，但其使用方式存在明显差异。在Chronicling America语料库中，我们通过FastText嵌入模型考虑了可能的OCR识别错误，并排除了文本重印内容，以兼顾19世纪的文本转载文化。研究采用Word2vec嵌入模型寻找与“奴隶”和“仆人”语义相近的词汇，并通过计算对数优势比来识别南方与北方报纸中过度表征的话语词汇。研究发现，“奴隶”一词与社会经济、法律及行政类词汇相关联，而“仆人”在北方报纸中多与宗教词汇关联，在南方报纸中则与家庭及亲属类词汇相联系。我们进一步发现，南方报纸中关于奴隶的话语词汇在北方报纸中更为普遍，而双方关于仆人的话语词汇则主要在本地区域内盛行。本研究有助于理解19世纪美国报纸如何围绕被奴役的非裔美国人构建不同的话语体系。