ANALYSIS OF RAW MATERIAL SUPPLY-DEMAND RELATIONSHIP USING N-GRAM: CHROME MINE EXAMPLE

Abstract

Depending on the strategic importance of the substance, the supply-demand relationship of the raw material has become remarkably important during the times of crisis. The type of raw material played an important role in this relationship from time to time. After the Industrial Revolution, some raw materials, especially in heavy industry and defense industry, became important due to their geography and the effect of the reserve amount. In some cases, issues such as supply security of these raw materials have caused serious security concerns and have even threatened the national survivability of some countries. Today, especially energy raw materials have undertaken such a mission, especially after the Industrial Revolution, industrial raw materials have been important during the two great war periods and the cold war period. One of these raw materials is chrome. In this study, the n-gram analysis of “chromium”, which is one of the important raw materials after its discovery in the 18th century, was carried out and its relationship with the important political events was analyzed with n-gram analysis. Using the interface provided by Google for the N-gram analysis, an analysis covering approximately the last hundred and fifty years was carried out in March 2020. The analysis was carried out within the scope of the corpus from 1850-2018, which is registered in the "Google books" database. As the browsing language, English, German, Russian, Italian and French languages were chosen, which were widely used in this period and available in the google n-gram analysis interface. 3 was chosen as the softening factor. As a result of the analysis, it was observed that the results of the n-gram analysis showed a high frequency of use in the two major world wars, especially where the raw material was an important factor. Chromium, which has an important place in the defense industry and has an important use in the steel industry and armored material production, has seen a considerable frequency of use in these periods. It was observed that the N-gram values also gave remarkable results for periods corresponding to important military-political events after the World War II. When all the findings are evaluated together, it is concluded that it is possible to investigate the relationship of raw material supply-demand relations with political events by n-gram analysis.