Trawling the Gulf of Bothnia of News: A Big Data Analysis of the Emergence of Terrorism in Swedish and Finnish Newspapers, 1780–1926

• This study combines history domain knowledge and language technology expertise to evaluate and expand on research claims regarding the historical meanings associated with terrorism in Swedish and Finnish contexts. Using a cross-border comparative approach and large newspaper corpora made available by the CLARIN research infrastructure, we explore overlapping national discourses on terrorism, the concept’s historical diversity and its relations to different national contexts. We are particularly interested in testing the hypothesis that substate terrorism’s modern meaning was not yet established in the 19th century but primarily restricted to Russian terrorism. We conclude that our comparative study finds both uniquely national and shared meanings of terrorism and that our study strengthen the hypothesis. In extension, the study also serves as an exploration of the potentials of cross-disciplinary evaluative studies based on extensive corpora and of cross-border comparative approaches to Swedish and Finnish newspaper corpora.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Historia och arkeologi -- Historia (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- History and Archaeology -- History (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Språkteknologi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Language Technology (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Filosofi, etik och religion -- Idé- och lärdomshistoria (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Philosophy, Ethics and Religion -- History of Ideas (hsv//eng)

Keyword

terrorism

history of terrorism

digital history

digital humanities

language technology

text mining

corpus linguistics

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)