A Multimodal Digital Humanities Study of Terrorism in Swedish Politics: An Interdisciplinary Mixed Methods Project on the Configuration of Terrorism in Parliamentary Debates, Legislation, and Policy Networks 1968–2018

• This paper presents the design of one of Sweden’s largest digital humanities projects, SweTerror, that through an interdisciplinary multi-modal methodological approach develops an extensive speech-to-text digital HSS resource. SweTerror makes a major contribution to the study of terrorism in Sweden through a comprehensive mixed methods study of the political discourse on terrorism since the late 1960s. Drawing on artificial intelligence in the form of state-of-the-art language and speech technology, it systematically analyses all forms of relevant parliamentary utterances. It explores and curates an exhaustive but understudied multi-modal collection of primary sources of central relevance to Swedish democracy: the audio recordings of the Swedish Parliament’s debates. The project studies the framing of terrorism both as policy discourse and enacted politics, examining semantic and emotive components of the parliamentary discourse on terrorism as well as major actors and social networks involved. It covers political responses to a range of terrorism-related issues as well as factors influencing policy-makers’ engagement, including political affiliations and gender. SweTerror also develops an online research portal, featuring the complete research material and searchable audio made readily accessible for further exploration. Long-term, the project establishes a model for combining extraction technologies (speech recognition and analysis) for audiovisual parliamentary data with text mining and HSS interpretive methods and the portal is designed to serve as a prototype for other similar projects.

Subject headings

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

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

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Annan teknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Other Engineering and Technologies (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Statsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Political Science (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Multimodal digital humanities

Speech technology

Terrorism studies

Multimodal digital humanities

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)