Collecting data from the internet may rather seem straightforward but it requires a lot of effort much in the same way as the traditional method of going to old dusty archives and digging up speeches from decades ago. One is spared from the physical logistics of having to travel to Iran and going to the library of the respective offices once a permit has been obtained to access the archives and copy the relevant speeches, making the work of digital data gathering much more attractive, particularly considering the potential danger of conducting such research. Still, it is not so much easier to obtain the statements needed for this study as digital security mechanisms are in place to prevent people from taking advantage of the online archives in the official websites of the Iranian statesmen. Since the supreme leader wants to expand his popularity and audience abroad, his two websites contain all his speeches translated in English but there are set limits as to how much a certain IP address can download, a problem I have encountered quite frequently, which I elaborate on in the section on limitations of the study below.
Downloading problems aside, the digital data gathering process proved to be tedious and complicated with problems presenting themselves at different stages. First, it took a couple of years to collect all the speeches. Second, the speeches did not have the same format. So, all of the speeches had to be converted into one single format to ensure the smooth running of the
262 By the time this dissertation was submitted, some of the websites have taken down their documents.
73 analysis software. For some speeches, relying on the good-old copy-paste method to convert some of the speeches on the websites as well as the PDF attachments to a text (.txt) file was the only option. Third, the date the speech was uploaded did not always correspond to the date the speech was delivered. For instance, a speech made by the supreme leader in 2003 was only uploaded in the 2006 folder of the website. To ensure the speeches were dated at the time they were delivered by the speaker, I went through and checked the files by reading them one by one. Fourth, I renamed each of the downloaded speeches for them to have the same format as those files I have converted to .txt, which took as much time as checking whether the dates were accurate. It took an enormous amount of time and patience to be meticulous about the data considering there are 1,930 speeches. Fifth, all the speeches were not in the same website. Some speeches have been deleted in the official websites but were available on third-party websites. Interviews of presidents for instance were mostly unavailable at the official websites but were found at the media outlet’s website like CNN and other news channels. Using the google search engine was not straightforward in digitally digging for the missing speeches as they were not usually in the mainstream websites appearing at the top of the results list. Lastly, noting the context of which the speaker was speaking to be able to find out at what event it was made was challenging since it required another reading of the 1,930 speeches. Due to the timeframe of this study, from the 1,930 speeches, only 1,888 were used for the analysis as these were the speeches from 1997 to 2015.
The data used for the quantitative chapter ends in December 2015 while the speeches read for the qualitative chapter, includes two speeches from 2016. The main reason for this being the completion of the quantitative part of the analysis in the first six months of 2016 using documents gathered only until 2015. I have attempted to download the data for 2016 from Iran’s official delegation to the UN website in 2017 only to find out they have eliminated their archives due to the construction of their website. I have checked for many months but the archives remain unavailable. Apart from the problem of unavailability, if the data were available, it would still require a significant amount of time to download the archives and go through the entire process of making sure the files are dated accurately and converting the files into a single format as well as noting the context of the hundreds of files from 2016. As I do not have the luxury of time, I have limited the dataset to 2015 at least for the general purposes of the quantitative chapter. But for the quantitative chapter, I added two easily accessible and available speeches. The two speeches are Khamenei’s Hajj speech in 2016 and Rouhani’s statement at the United Nations General Assembly respectively. They are both added to the graphs discussing the Hajj speeches
74 and the UN General Assembly speeches of the presidents and foreign minister but not included in the yearly summary graphs as they are only two speeches of 2016 out of the numerous data available for the period. Apart from their accessibility, formatting and analysing the two speeches from 2016 did not consume so much time. Reading these two speeches from 2016 were vital to the qualitative part of the analysis as they contain significant themes and argumentations useful for this research.
The digital files I have collected were analysed using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. I aimed to show how the three traditions are reflected in the political rhetoric of the statesmen providing them with a roadmap of their foreign policy and using mixed-methods can generate a more holistic analysis. The quantitative phase provides the first indications of the three traditions through the percentage of shares, meaning the number of words per tradition divided by the total number of words within the text multiplied by one hundred. Meanwhile the qualitative phase deals with the careful examination through a close reading of the texts to reveal the themes, strategies and meanings, bringing the three traditions together thereby explaining Iran’s foreign policy manoeuvres.