Umeå University's logo

In this article, we investigate traces of a news media logic in the Swedish parliamentary speeches from 1920 to 2019. Drawing on theories of mediatisation, we examine two aspects: the length of the speeches and repeated political slogans. Our analysis is based on a complete corpus of parliamentary records with annotated speeches. Speech length was measured based on word count, and the identification of slogans was based on repeated seven-word segments, filtered to exclude generic phrases. While it is difficult to draw any definitive conclusions about the influence of an external media logic, the speech length has dropped by 50 per cent since 1920. This change relates to new parliamentary procedures, and from the 1980s, with the explicit goal to attract the news media. Short and snappy political slogans have increased significantly since the 1990s. This development reflects previous research stating that sound bites are getting shorter.

What a politician says in the parliament is not always what gets printed. In turning spoken words into printed records, the language changes, often towards formalization. The stenographers play a key role in this linguistic transformation. Their job is to align oral speeches with linguistic norms and parliamentary nomenclature. In this context, the formulaic trumps the personal. In our paper, we target these formulaic transformations, which we call the stenographic bias. Our analytical work is guided by the following research questions: In what ways are the printed records shaped by the stenographic bias? And what mechanisms are part of shaping this bias?

The paper is empirically based on stenographic guidelines defining language norms and procedural rules, primarily from the 1980s and 2020s, as well as supplemented parliamentary material. To study the formulaic language over time and how language norms and rules affected the printed debate records on the aggregated level, we make use of a recent annotated dataset of Swedish parliamentary speeches from 1920 to 2020. By combining close reading and distant reading we aim to identify and discuss cases and phrases that shed light on the way stenographic norms and procedures have influenced parliamentarians’ speeches as they are recorded in the protocols.

The Swedish parliamentary records are an important source material for social science and humanities researchers. We introduce a new research corpus, the Swedish Parliament Corpus, which is larger and more developed than previously available research corpora for the Swedish parliament. The corpus contains annotated and structured parliamentary records over more than 150 years, through the bicameral parliament (1867–1970) and the unicameral parliament (1971–). In addition to the records, which contain all speeches in the parliament, we also provide a database of all members of parliament over the same period. Along with the corpus, we describe procedures to ensure data quality. The corpus facilitates detailed analysis of parliamentary speeches in several research fields.

Does media history really start with a bang? More than just newspapers, television, and social networks, media are the means by which any information is communicated, from cosmic radiation traces to medieval church bells to modern identity documents. Cultures are held together as much by bookkeeping and records as they are by stories and myths. From Big Bang to Big Data is a long history of the media - how it has been established, used, and transformed from the beginning of recorded time until the present. It is not primarily a story of revolutions and innovations, but of continuities and overlaps that reveal surprising patterns across history. Many media were invented as ways to store and share information, and many have served as powerful tools for administration and control. The concerns raised about media today, whether about privacy, piracy, or anxieties over declining cultural standards, preoccupied earlier generations too. In a playful style, accompanied by more than one hundred illustrations, the authors show us how every society has been a media society in its own way. From antique graffiti to last year's viral YouTube clip, the past is only approachable through media. From Big Bang to Big Data provides a new way of thinking about media in history - and about human societies past and present.

This article is tracing a newspaper poem, originally published in 1795 in the section for lost and found, and reprinted repeatedly in newspapers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The poem describes a girl who has lost a pouch with her sewing kit on a walk through Stockholm. The one who returns it is promised two sugar breads and a kiss as a reward. It was published anonymously but Anna Maria Lenngren was later identified as the author. Following the poem from paper to paper reveals a network of text reuse where texts were borrowed, edited and recontextualized. Several papers all around Sweden published the verse as an anonymous advertisement from 1837 to 1868. Yet, among other things, the editors also changed the place name mentioned in the poem to make it seem as if it was written by a local girl. Another version of the text was widely circulated in papers from 1887 to 1917. This version was truer to the original wording of the poem, but it was published along with an anecdote identifying Lenngren herself as the girl in the text, making it part of her own marriage proposal. This time the poem was placed in the section for humorous titbits, among gossip and funny stories. The different versions of the poem illustrate how newspapers could function as a medium for literature in the nineteenth century. The practice of text reuse had the potential of maximizing the readership but could also mean that authors lost control over their words. When poems became “fugitive verses” in the network of newspapers, they entered a fluid state where authorships were destabilized and texts were recontextualized to fit on the newspaper page.

Based on digital readings of all records from the Swedish parliament1867–2019, we examine how the concept ‘propaganda’ was used in the debates. To track the concept, we have extracted word window co-occurrences, bigrams, and keywords. Research on the history of propaganda in liberal democracies has emphasized that the meaning of the concept was open-ended before WWI. By 1945, it had been contaminated by authoritarian propaganda, and its negative connotations were cemented at least by the 1960s. Our analysis, however, shows that 'propaganda' was used mainly in a negative sense from 1867 to 2019. Nevertheless, it was also possible to use 'propaganda 'in a positive and neutral sense between the 1910s and 1980s. We suggest that a period of deideologization in Sweden post-WWII made it possible to use 'propaganda' as long as the issues were seen as non-controversial. The radicalization in the late-1960s meant that authorities and previously non-controversial issues became contested. To suggest one-directional 'propaganda' in order to implement what politicians had decided was in people's best interest became difficult int his context. In this new communication setting, 'information' was a more flexible term in contexts where ‘propaganda’ had previously been used in a neutral or positive sense.

This paper explores the contexts of the keywords "propaganda", "information" and "upplysning" in the Swedish parliamentary debate protocols, from 1920 to 2019. The digitized protocols have recently been annotated with metadata for speakers’ gender and party affiliation. Based on perspectives developed within conceptual history, we have traced the concepts in the parliamentary debates and used computational methods to cluster the contexts in which they occur. Word windows around the three keywords were compiled into a subcorpus, and topic modelling was used to cluster the contexts. The findings show that the distribution of the topics gets more even over time, partly explained by the spread of the term "information" in various political areas in the mid-20th century. Furthermore, the only distinct topic shared between the three keywords relates to campaigns to limit and prevent the consumption of alcohol, narcotics and tobacco. While a conceptual shift takes place within this topic, from "upplysning" to "information", it is also shown that it was possible to discuss and frame these issues in terms of "propaganda" post-WWII – it even became more common to do so in the 1950s and 1960s.

DESKS ARE CENTRAL NODES IN OUR MODERN SOCIETY. Office employees spend many of their working hours behind desks. School children doing homework sit at them, as do authors writing fiction. Countries are governed and corporations are controlled by people behind desks. Those of us working from the couch do not escape them, since they are remediated in the graphical user interface on our computers. Most research is the product of desk work, but little scholarly attention has been paid to the desks themselves.

This book presents new perspectives on changing ideals and practices surrounding desks and desk work in offices, homes, and in popular culture. The authors represent a broad range of interests and disciplines: business administration, cultural studies, library and information science, literary studies, media and communication studies, media history, and social work. They have all been encouraged to ask new questions about familiar contexts and topics: What is the role of the desk in the daily lives of social workers? What difference does it make that most traders on the financial markets have moved from trading floors to desks where movements and transactions are visible on screens? Why are so many talk show hosts sitting behind desks? And what happens when the desks are left for other arrangements?

This paper explores what was explicitly defined as ‘political’ duringthe post-war era, from 1945 to 1989, in two Swedish newspapers. Based on allextracted text blocks containing the term ‘political’, two research questions areexamined: How has the use of the term “political” evolved over time? In whichcontexts was the concept inscribed, and how did these change over time? In-spired by conceptual history, the analysis is divided into three parts: an examina-tion of ‘political’ through bigram extractions, contextual explorations using topicmodeling, and a close reading of one particular topic over time, the topic labeled‘women’. The result shows an increased use of the term ‘political’ from the1960s, with more things that were labeled as ‘political’. The analysis reveals thatthe concept was broadened, but not entirely redefined.