Description

In this visualization we represent the most frequent words used in the official magazines of the IS: Dabiq and Rumiyah. All the editions are arranged chronologically. After issue #15, the Dabiq magazine was closed, and the magazine Rumiyah was opened. The second issue of Rumiyah was published mid October 2016.

The graph show that the most recurrent word is “Allah”, the name used in the Islamic world to refer to god. Also, it is remarkable how “Islamic” and “State” recur together in the magazines issues, showing a strong correlation of the terms, from which we can infer a strong self-referential concern. Most of the words are related to religion. Also, it is interesting to notice that words that one would expect to be used a lot, such as “War” and “Jihad”, are actually rarely used.

Another thing that emerged from the analysis of the text of the official magazines of the IS, is the use of Arabic words in latin characters. This tag cloud shows the most recurrent Arabic words throughout the editions of the magazines. We think that this act of translation of Arabic terms into the English language represents an attempt of the IS to “alphabetize” or even to “Arabize” the English speaker readers and make them familiar with the Arabic language.

For instance, the sentence “Sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam” means “Prayer of god be upon him and his family and peace” and it often appears in a celebrative article of a fighter; “Ar Rafida” which is used in a derogatory manner by Sunni Muslims, especially Salafis, to refer to Shia Muslims; “Murtadd” that means Apostasy in Islam.

Protocol

To analyze the brand image of ISIS, we proceeded by analyzing their official text production extracted from their digital magazines written with the English language: Dabiq and Rumiyah. The magazines were obtained from the association The Clarion Project which gathers and collects different Islamic material. The articles’ text was analyzed on the contents; the tool used is Voyant Tools to analyze the amount of words used. The data obtained was later processed with Excel and OpenRefine to clean it and to facilitate the procedure of designing the visualisation. Also, we had to manually correct some translation errors or misunderstanding of the words by the software.

Data

Timestamp: 06/12/2016 - 13/12/2016

Data source: Voyant tool, The Clarion Project

Download data

In this dataset are collected and organized all the recurrent words, ordered in 4 sections: Total, Selection, Arabic Words and Graphic. For the first visualization, the file gathers the first 25 recurrent words per each issue’s article, the images amount, the length (in words) of each issue, date of publication and page numbers. Given the resulting large amount of data, we proceeded selecting the words (removing verbs and articles) to retain the top 16 recurrent words.

For the second visualization the most recurrent words in Arabic from all the magazines’ text were gathered together.

The Excel file contains two specific sheets that were set up to create the visualizations. “Graphic” contains the date of the issue of the magazine, number of edition, the words, and words count. “Arabic Words” contains the Arabic words written using latin characters, its phonetic corrispettive and number or recurrency.