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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.

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.

The workshop Digital Parliamentary Data in Action (DiPaDA 2022) was organised in Uppsala on March 15, 2022, co-located with the 6th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference (DHNB). These workshop proceedings reflect the aims of the workshop to foster interaction and stimulate conversations between humanities, social sciences, and computational sciences – representing scholars from the Nordic region and beyond that work with digital parliamentary data. The contributions in the proceedings present results of ongoing research on creating and using historical and present parliamentary data to study parliamentary culture, politics, language use, and the media. Moreover, the contributions offer novel perspectives on applying, curating, and representing this key societal data, and discuss the future opportunities and challenges in such research.

The workshop Digital Parliamentary Data in Action (DiPaDA 2022) was organised in Uppsala on March 15, 2022, co-located with the 6th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference (DHNB). These workshop proceedings reflect the aims of the workshop to foster interaction and stimulate conversations between humanities, social sciences, and computational sciences – representing scholars from the Nordic region and beyond that work with digital parliamentary data. The contributions in the proceedings present results of ongoing research on creating and using historical and present parliamentary data to study parliamentary culture, politics, language use, and the media. Moreover, the contributions offer novel perspectives on applying, curating, and representing this key societal data, and discuss the future opportunities and challenges in such research.

This open access edited volume shines new light on the history of propaganda and persuasion during the Nordic welfare epoch. A common analytical framework is developed that highlights transnational and transmedial perspectives rather than national or monomedial histories. The return of propaganda in contemporary debate underlines the need to historically contextualize the role and function of persuasive communication activities in the Nordic region and beyond. Building on an empirically situated approach, the chapters in this volume break new ground by covering a range of themes, from cultural diplomacy and nation branding to media materiality and information infrastructures. In doing so, the book stresses that the Nordic welfare epoch, with its associated epithet the “Nordic Model”, was built not only on governance, social security and economic productivity, but also on propaganda and persuasion.

The introduction to the edited collection maps the overarching aims of the book, discusses the time frame and the geographical focus, and situates the book in a media historical research tradition on propaganda and persuasion. A key ambition with this volume is to advance a transnational approach to media history, highlighting how actors and institutions, ideas and practices, have been shaped by transnational entanglements within the Nordic region and beyond. Further, the introduction lays out the rationale for focusing on the entanglement of things, ideas and actors rather than media representations, cross-border connections rather than national comparisons, as well as the importance of a broad media concept in the study of propaganda and persuasion. Lastly, the introduction provides a short overview of chapters included in the book.

This chapter studies the exchanges of ideas and experiences related to public information within the Nordic region and beyond. As an empirical case, the analytical focus centres on the Swedish Board of Public Information (Nämnden för samhällsinformation, 1971–1981) and traces the various contacts—through seminars, study visits, conferences, and so on—that the agency initiated and was part of during the 1970s. By examining the archival material through the concepts of epistemic community and circulation of knowledge, the analysis shows how issues of public information attracted various actors—which represented different social sectors (bureaucracy, advertising industry, academia, etc.) and different interests—that met across national borders in attempts to address challenges of communicating societal important information to citizens.