Comments on: An Analysis of UK Parliamentary Language: 1935-2010

By: Chris Hanretty

Chris Hanretty — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:09:01 +0000

@Dan: thanks for running the extra graph — it makes sense to me, esp. since after Maastricht (1992) the references would have been to the European Union instead of the European Community, so a tail off would be expected.

By: What’s the Value of Great Content?

What’s the Value of Great Content? — Sat, 22 May 2010 17:32:39 +0000

[...] we published a blog post (“An Analysis of UK Parliamentary Language: 1935-2010”), the purpose of which was to generate backlinks to our site. Our site is new (less than a week [...]

By: Life of Alan » links for 2010-05-20

Life of Alan » links for 2010-05-20 — Fri, 21 May 2010 04:01:47 +0000

[...] "An Analysis of UK Parliamentary Language: 1935-2010" Language is important. Along with other indicators of communication, such as body language, it tells people who we are and what matters to us. The web has created opportunities for written and, in this case, spoken language to be examined with much more scrutiny than in previous generations. (tags: UK:History) [...]

By: James West

James West — Fri, 21 May 2010 03:52:12 +0000

I know officially it was a conflivt, but there’s barely a flicker of “war” in 1982. Shows how much the whole house stuck to that particular line.

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 20 May 2010 23:39:40 +0000

@Michel Thanks so much for pointing that out; we were wondering what kind of US analysis had already been done, and that’s pretty cool.

By: Michel

Michel — Thu, 20 May 2010 23:28:48 +0000

A somewhat similar idea using the State of the Union addresses in the US can be found here: http://zunob.com/?q=content/linguistics-analysis-state-union-addresses

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 20 May 2010 18:58:10 +0000

@Chris Just a quick follow up – it’s going to take a little time to do anything with entity parsers, but I have just quickly created a ‘bonus’ graph that compares “community” with “european” mentions (because of the way we parsed data, I can’t search for phrases, only single words). There is certainly some correlation between the rise of the two terms in the 1970s and 1980s: http://contentini.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/european_community.png

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 20 May 2010 18:01:49 +0000

@Chris Nice thought – we could certainly use Calais or Yahoo Term Extractor to do a more detailed analysis of specific named entities, as you suggest. Great idea.

By: Chris Hanretty

Chris Hanretty — Thu, 20 May 2010 17:57:27 +0000

I imagine that the rise in references is largely a rise in references to the European Community, as was. Maybe you could run the data through a named entity recognizer first?