Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

24
IHR Digital History Seminar Quantifying the Language of British Politics, 1880-1914 1 Dr. Luke Blaxill: King’s College London [email protected]

Transcript of Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

Page 1: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

IHR Digital History Seminar

Quantifying the Language of British Politics, 1880-1914

1

Dr. Luke Blaxill:

King’s College London [email protected]

Page 2: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

The Linguistic Turn and Electoral Politics

• Great deal of recent interest in language in electoral politics since the ‘linguistic turn’

• The turn has given us a great deal, but its focus on deep readings of specific texts in isolation has often caused historians, especially of language, to be gun-shy of offering broader explanations.

• Many historians have called for a ‘reintegration’ of the explanatory ambition of the old social-scientific historical tradition with the new sensitivity to language.

But how could such a reintegration occur?

Page 3: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

My Proposal: Quantitative language analysis with a Corpus

A corpus: a huge bank of text of several million words

Candidates’ Speeches from Press SCANNED Computerised Corpus:

Millions of words of freely searchable text

Page 4: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

My Corpora

1 2

What are they used for?

To trace the patterns and associations of interesting words on

a huge scale.

East Anglian Speeches 1880-1910. Subdivided per party, per election

(1 million words)

National Speeches 1880-1910. Subdivided per party, per election

(4 million words)

Page 5: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

Corpus-driven Quantification in action: Example One: Ireland, 1880-1900

Page 6: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

Corpus-driven Quantification in action: Example Two: Imperialism 1880-1900

How can we measure the ‘language of Imperialism’ with a corpus?

Proposed solution: try to construct a controlled vocabulary or a ‘taxonomy’ composed of words which reliably correlate to occasions when a speaker is using such language.

A five word Taxonomy of Imperialism: • Imperial (and all variants)

• Empire

• Flag

• British (and all variants)

• Colony (and all variants)

Page 7: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

Corpus-driven Quantification in action: Example Two: Imperialism 1880-1900

To ensure the ascriptions of ‘the language of imperialism’

are correct, each word is checked in its original context:

Page 8: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

Corpus-driven Quantification in action: Example Two: Imperialism 1880-1900

Page 9: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

The Case for using Corpus-driven quantification to study Political Language

k

Page 10: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

The Case for using Corpus-driven quantification to study Political Language

Five Arguments 1. Amenability of political (especially electoral) language to

analysis by these techniques.

2. Difficult to measure quantity by intuition.

3. Corpora can help establish typicality better than selected quotations from speech.

3. Numerical conclusions easy to verify

4. More empirical approach to working can illuminate unexpected patterns otherwise hard to detect

Page 11: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

Case Study: The Impact of the 1883-85

Reforms on Rural Political Language

1. Was there a major shift in the nature of political appeals in East

Anglia? Were farmers issues and the language of farming

supplanted by agricultural labourer’s issues?

2. Can we attempt to measure the influence of Chamberlain's

Unauthorised Programme on political language in East Anglia?

Was it influential?

Page 12: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

The Language of Farming 1880-1885

Page 13: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

The Language of Farming 1835-1900

1886-1910

Page 14: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

The Language of Agricultural Labourers 1880-1885

Page 15: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

The Language of Radicalism 1880-1885

Page 16: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

The word ‘Land’ in context in 1885

Context of Liberal Mentions of Land (130 total) Score

Percentage of total

mentions

Benefits of owning land 30 23%

Land ownership monopoly 20 15%

Attacks on landowners 24 18%

Transfer of land simplification/ facilitation 16 12%

Evocations of the past 8 6%

Compulsory purchase 8 6%

Context of Conservative Mentions of Land (158 total) Score

Percentage of

total mentions

Theft/compulsory taking of land 36 23%

Transfer of land simplification/ facilitation 27 17%

General mocking of Radical land reform 14 9%

Good Landlords 13 8%

General issues of agriculture and farming 18 11%

Page 17: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

Conclusions

1. Major break from the past in 1885 in language, not just in electioneering.

2. The Agricultural Laborer eclipsed the farmer as the most visible in vocabulary remarkably quickly. This suggests that the perceived interests of the voting base were perhaps the key factor in determining the content of platform speeches.

3. Unauthorised Programme had a big impact on electoral language in the countryside.

4. Overall: Chamberlain was in a much stronger position after 1885 than Historians have argued, but the biggest group within the electorate who supported him was the agricultural labourer- not who he had thought.

Page 18: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

Thank You.

Page 19: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

• Note: The following few pages show extras tables and graphs, which aren’t part of the paper but might be referred to in discussions.

Page 20: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

Corpus-driven Quantification in action: Gladstone, 1880-1892

EAST ANGLIA NATIONAL SPEAKERS

Page 21: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

‘Gladstone’: Top Contexts 42% Foreign Policy Weakness

17% Inferiority to Disraeli

8% Good orator

16% Disunity

11% Disestablishment

7% General Gordon

7% Financial incompetence

57% Irish Home Rule

11% Liberal Unionists

7% Abandoning Land Reform

56% Irish Home Rule

14% Disunity

12% Newcastle Programme

11% General Greatness

General Greatness 20%

Financial competence 17%

Bringer of Peace 14%

Superiority to Disraeli 14%

Manifesto/Programme 21%

Party unity 21%

General Greatness 20%

Irish Home Rule 39%

General Greatness 30%

Newcastle Programme 12%

1880

1885

1892

Irish Home Rule 40%

General Greatness 29%

Party unity 17%

Superiority to Chamberlain 13% 1886

Page 22: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

Boroughs versus counties in 1885

Lemma East Anglia

Borough

East Anglia

County

Other

Borough

Other

County

Radical 96 86 72 99

Class 64 132 56 78

Programme 50 16 37 37

Chamberlain 70 88 60 72

Land Reform 276 374 72 142

Church 220 186 151 180

Education/School/Child 254 248 176 177

Working Man/Class 42 104 50 43

Reform 56 116 67 93

Total 1128 1350 741 921

Page 23: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

Education Issue in 1885: top contexts

Liberals mentions of

School, Child, Education (163

mentions) Score

Percentage of total

mentions

Poor people priced out of education 34 21%

General expressions of support in favour

of free education 34 21%

Will give dignity to poor/ will help poor 19 12%

Improve social mobility of poor 14 9%

Reassurance that religious aspect to

education will be kept 9 6%

Conservative mentions of school,

Child, Education (146 mentions) Score

Percentage of total

mentions

Weaken voluntary schools 26 18%

Expensive, wasteful 24 16%

Highlighting Liberal attack on religious

basis of education 19 13%

Stops people being stakeholders* 13 9%

Criticising compulsory and universal

education 16 11%

Poor standard of board Schools 5 3%

Page 24: Blaxill ihr digital_history_slides

Church Disestablishment in 1885: top contexts

Context of Liberal Mentions of Church (105

total) Score Percentage of total mentions

Proclamations in favour of Disestablishment 37 35%

Disestablishment as a route to Religious

Equality 17 16%

Candidate distancing themselves from

Disestablishment 10 10%

Attacks on Conservatives for politicising the

Church 9 9%

Context of Conservative Mentions of

Church (111) Score Percentage of total mentions

Attacks on Liberals for tying to weaken/

abolish Church 36 32%

General vows to protect Church 31 28%

Benefits of Church (Education) 5 5%

Benefits of Church (Church sponsored

charities) 11 10%

Benefits of Church (Classless, available for all

Classes) 10 9%

Benefits of Church (Education) 3 3%

Benefits of Church (Improvement of character) 3 3%