Graphing the grammar of motives in National Security Strategies: Cultural interpretation, automated text analysis and the drama of global politics

• We apply Kenneth Burke's “grammar of motives” in analyzing national security texts.
• A series of U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) documents (1990–2010) is analyzed.
• We use advanced text mining technologies to model Burke's “dramatistic pentad”.
• We show the shift over time in the rhetorical focus of NSS documents.
• The rhetorical focus has moved from the logic of Cold War to that of a War on Terror.

The literary theorist Kenneth Burke (1945) outlined a methodology for identifying the basic “grammar of motives” that operate within texts. His strategy was to identify the logical form that is used for attributing meaning to human situations. We imagine how a variant of Burke's method might be applied in the era of automated text analysis, and then we explore an implementation of that variant (using a combination of natural language process, semantic parsers and statistical topic models) in analyzing a corpus of eleven U.S. “National Security Strategy” documents that were produced between 1990 and 2010. This “automated process” for textual coding and analysis is shown to have much utility for analyzing these types of texts and to hold out the promise for being useful for other types of text corpora, as well—thereby opening up new possibilities for the scientific study of rhetoric.