Detecting historical turning points in Italian media: a complex systems approach to a diachronic news corpus

• DOI: 10.3389/fcpxs.2026.1868587
• ArXiv number: 2606.14348

Introduction:
The increasing availability of large-scale textual corpora has opened new possibilities for data-driven, quantitative approaches to historical analysis using Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, diachronic corpora with historical relevance from the pre-digital era remain scarce and often incomplete.
Methods:
We present a quantitative approach to historical analysis based on the reconstruction and exploration of a diachronic corpus of around 600,000 articles from the Italian newspaper “La Repubblica”, covering all the articles published from the first of January 1985 to the 31st of December 2000 - a period of major political, social, and geopolitical change in Italy and globally. Using NLP techniques, we analyze the text at both lexical and semantic levels; we then apply tools from complex systems and statistical physics to trace shifts in media discourse over time.
Results:
The word usage in the corpus is bursty, with a heavy-tailed distribution of Fano factors that is robust across timescales. Changepoints in word salience and the block structure of semantic similarity allow us to detect key transition periods, such as the transition from the First Republic to the Second Republic in Italy, or major international conflicts like the Gulf War or the Kosovo War, without relying on prior labeling. Periods of war correspond to lower entropy in the semantic space, indicating a more focused discourse.
Discussion:
The results show how combining computational linguistics with ideas from complex systems can offer new quantitative insight into historical changes, opening up new paths for studying the dynamics of media and society through large-scale textual data.

• Full paper

Related research projects

PAELLA

From social networks to open science: a frequency corpus for global cultural and linguistic studies

P.I.: David Sánchez

This project addresses an urgent scientific and social need: the lack of massive and open corpora that allow for the objective analysis of language use and information dissemination on social media. At …

CoSASTI-UIB

Complex Systems Approach to Social and Technological Interactions

P.I.: David Sánchez, Raúl Toral

Human interactions have traditionally been the subject of the social sciences, separate from the natural sciences. The trend towards quantitative and computational social sciences is recent, and the theory of complex systems …

MdM-IFISC-2

Maria de Maeztu 2023-2026

P.I.: Ernesto Estrada, Ingo Fischer, Emilio Hernández-García, Rosa Lopez, Claudio Mirasso, Jose Javier Ramasco, Raúl Toral, Roberta Zambrini

After 15 years of its existence, IFISC can point to a proven track record of impactful research. The previous 2018-2022 MdM award has significantly enhanced the institute's capabilities, as demonstrated by an …