Trawling and Trolling for Terrorists in the Digital Gulf of Bothnia: Cross-lingual Text Mining for the Emergence of Terrorism in Swedish and Finnish Newspapers, 1780–1926

• In pursuing the historical emergence of the discourse on terrorism, this study trawls the “digital Gulf of Bothnia” in the form of a corpus of combined Swedish and Finnish digitized newspaper texts. Through a cross-lingual exploration of the uses of the concept of terrorism in historical Swedish and Finnish news, we examine meanings anchored in the two culturally close but still decidedly different national political contexts. The study is an outcome of an integrative interdisciplinary effort by Swe-Clarin, using resources accessible through the CLARIN infrastructure to enrich scholarship in the humanities. The capabilities of the corpus tool Korp enable us to affirm prior research on the conceptual history of terrorism, but also to suggest a complex and diverse picture of the connotations of terrorism, both as state and sub-state violence up until the 20th century. At the same time, the study allows us to explore the potentials of cross-lingual text mining for historical analysis of national online newspaper corpora provided by Swe-Clarin and FIN-CLARIN.

Subject headings

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keyword

history of terrorism

digital history

Korp

comparative corpus studies

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kap (subject category)