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Abstract
In an explorative manner, this article uses a data-driven digital history set-up to focus on media political issues in Sweden during the second half of the twentieth century. By distant reading and topic modeling a dataset of 3100 Swedish Government Official Reports between 1945 and 1989—a corpus of some 87 million tokens—the article gives a new perspective of how the Swedish state examined and discussed media in general and media politics in particular. Topic modeling is a computational method to study latent themes or discourses in a dataset by accentuating words that tend to co-occur and together create different topics. Via a computational interrogation of the dataset in a Jupyter Lab environment a number of media topics can be detected. They include the most common words for each media topic, but also reveal temporal periodizations when media political issues were foremost discussed as well as other societal topics that media was related to.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 For a media historical critique of mediatisation theory, see Snickars, “Media and Mediatization.”
2 Bunout, Ehrmann and Clavert, Digitised Newspapers; Salmi et al., “The Reuse of Texts in Finnish Newspapers and Journals, 1771–1920.”
3 Williams, “Networking Moving Image History”; Fickers, Snickars, and Williams, “Audiovisual Data in Digital Humanities”; Lingold, Mueller, and Trettien, Digital Sound Studies; Jofre et al., “What’s in a Face?”
4 Abercrombie and Batista-Navarro, “Sentiment and Position-Taking Analysis of Parliamentary Debates.” Hansard at Huddersfield can be found at https://hansard.hud.ac.uk/site/site.php. Swedish parliamentary motions 1971–2021 at https://riksdagsmotioner.dh.gu.se/, and German plenary minutes from the Bundestag 1949–2021 at https://opendiscourse.de/.
5 For more information about the research project Welfare State Analytics, see https://www.westac.se/en/. Datasets and scripts used by the project are available on Github, https://github.com/welfare-state-analytics.
6 Premfors, “Governmental Commissions in Sweden,” 624.
7 Åmark, Hundra år av välfärdspolitik; Östberg and Andersson, Sveriges historia 1965–2012; Norén and Snickars, “Distant Reading the History of Swedish Film Politics.”
8 Grimmer and Stewart, “Text as Data.”
9 For a discussion, see Ahnert et al., The Network Turn.
10 Guldi, “Parliament’s Debates About Infrastructure.”
11 Jockers, Macroanalyses.
12 Hakkarainen and Iftikhar, “The Many Themes of Humanism,” 261.
13 See for example, Isoaho, Gritsenko, and Mäkelä, “Topic Modeling and Text Analysis for Qualitative Policy Research,” “Patterns and Interpretation”; Moretti, Distant Reading, 46.
14 Moretti, “Patterns and Interpretation”; Moretti, Distant Reading, 46.
15 Snickars, Kulturarvets mediehistoria.
16 See for example, Hadenius, Kampen om monopolet and Weibull, “New Media Between Technology and Content.”
17 SOU 1989:73, 77.
18 SOU 1980:8, 9.
19 SOU 1984:10, 3.
20 Hyvönen, Snickars, and Vesterlund, “The Formation of Swedish Media Studies.”
21 Roger Blomgren, Staten och filmen and Leif Furhammar, Filmen i Sverige.
22 Djerf-Pierre and Ekström, “Approaching Broadcast History,” 17.
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Pelle Snickars
Pelle Snickars, Department of Arts & Cultural Sciences, Division of ALM & Digital Cultures, Lund University, Lund, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]