Information som lösning, information som problem : En digital läsning av tusentals statliga utredningar

• This article investigates how the Swedish information politics emerged in the twentieth century by analysing thousands of Swedish Governmental Official Reports (8000 reports since 1922). By using methods such as topic modelling with LDA/MALLET, the result shows that a governmental information discourse arose in the 1960s, infiltrating a growing number of political interests, and that the content of the discourse has changed over time.One important conclusion highlights digital text methods as a more inductive way of doing content analysis than is commonly practised in media and communication studies. A machine can find patterns in texts that no single person could read in a lifetime. Furthermore, the quantitative approach can generate results that problematise previous – qualitative – research. Digital and quantitative analysis of a huge corpora does not neglect close reading; on the contrary this study shows the necessity of bridging both methods in order to better understand the results.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

Keyword

information politics

topic modeling

digital methods

Swedish governmental official reports

medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap

media and communication studies

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)