Category: Voices of the European Parliament

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What is the past and what is the future?

“Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Fundamental questions & a theoretical framework

Having thought about these key issues of our research, we constructed a four-layered model that represents notions about the past and the future.

  1. The past is “what really happened”, everything that has ever happened up until this point in time. The past is objective — however, we cannot get directly to the past — it is unreachable.
  2. History is “what we think happened”. History is our tool to talk about the past. When we think about the past, we are creating history. History is subjective — as soon as we talk about the past, we can never be objective. It is also selective — history is only a tiny fraction of the past, of everything that ever happened. History is a narrative about the past influenced by morals, ideology, politics and ideas. History can be both concrete (“historical facts”) and abstract (theories, ideologies, etc.)
  3. Political discourse is “what we talk should have happened” and “what we talk should happen”. It is even more subjective and selective. It is, amongst other things, the way we talk and express ideas about the past and future.

3.1. Regarding the past, political discourse on the one hand draws and builds on our idea of the past, what we call “our history”. One’s ideas of the past influence and inform one’s political discourse. On the other hand, political discourse also influences other people’s ideas of the past, their view of history.

3.2. Regarding the future, political discourse builds on history to construct and envision a specific idea of the future.

4. The future is “what we think, plan, hope and fear will happen”. It is everything that could ever happen from this point in time onwards. It is also subjective and selective. The future is a concept: a narrative we construct about the thihgs that will happen, influenced by our morals, ideologies, politics and ideas. Just like history allows us to construct countless different narratives about the past, talking about the future offers endless different versions that can be proposed.

Although we speak about the past and the future, we stay at present therefore our narrative is framed by the context — in our case, political.

There also would be various connections between the past and the future: the past might be something great or disastrous and we might avoid or repeat it. According to this, the ideas about the relations between the past and the future could be the following:

  1. We should learn on mistakes on the past in order to avoid them in future.
  2. We should not repeat out experience from the past.
  3. We should stay on the way we stood for years.
  4. We should restore our past we lost in future.

Some findings from the corpus of speeches

We also did some analysis of the corpus in order to find which words MPs use while speaking about the past and the future.

The notions related with the past are, for example, knowledge, recovery, culture, post-Communism and such notions as principle, prospect, strategy, situation are connected with the future. There are also some ideas that lie between tha past and the future.

The verb map shows what can we do while speaking about the past and the future.

The last image illustrates the most common adjectives in the speeches about the past and the future.

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Facts about our data

Now it’s time to present the data we work with in order to show you how huge our plans and intentions.

So, what we have? We explore the linked Open Dataset with data from and about the European Parliament (EP): the parliamentary debates translations from 1999 till 2017. It includes 247,955 dociments with the length from 121 to 394 words. All of them also contain metadata such as a name of speaker, country, date of birth, gender, function.

We have speeches in original language and its English translation provided with the date and the link to the video.

Our main interest focuses on the concepts of the past and the future and the way they are represented in the speeches. To start, we counted the number of mentions of these concepts: MPs expessed ideas about the future 30771 times and only 9214 they spoke about the past.

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Our team

Our European Parliament team is a group of students and researchers competent in computer science, political science, linguistic, media studies. We are from Finland, Germany, Russia, Croatia, Austria.

Aleksandra Konovalova

I have graduated from Saint Petersburg State University with MA in Applied Linguistics and worked for 2 years as a Linguist. My main goal is to understand and to learn how to use my skills more effectively in the field of Digital Humanities and to continue work in this field.

Daria Ustyuzhanina

I am a senior lecturer in the department of journalism and literary studies of Siberian federal University, Krasnoyarsk, Russia. I also work on my PhD thesis on social creativity in the online sphere. My research interests include such topics as media, education, data visualization in journalism.

Ellimaija Tanskanen

I did my bachelor’s degree at the university of Helsinki majoring in French language studies and I am starting a master’s degree in communications. My interest in cross-disciplinarity and digital methods applied to languages and humanities led me to the hackathon. My goal is to learn more about different research methods and working in a pluridisciplinary team on a research project.

Gabrielle Mantell

I am a master’s student in European and Nordic Studies at the University of Helsinki. My current research focuses on the use of computational and memetic propaganda within the context of global politics. I hold a MA in Science and Security from King’s College London and a BA in International Relations from Mount Holyoke College. I have also worked in the tech industry as a UX researcher, focusing on human-computer interaction. My research interests include computational international relations, machine learning and geopolitics.

Gerlinde Theunissen

I am a Erasmus Mundus Master student in Public Policy, Political Economy and Development Studies at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and the IBEI in Barcelona. My background is in Political Science and Public Administration at the University Konstanz and the University Leiden and my current interest is in social policies, socio-economic inequalities, gender inequality, border studies and migration. Curious about comparative social research methods brought me to the Hackathon and I am eager to explore various methods to analyse political speeches and debates.

Iuliia Nikolaenko

I work as a trainee in Digital Russia Studies network and I’m an exchange student in the University of Helsinki Social Sciences Faculty. I currently study in Master’s program “Comparative Social Research” at Higher School of Economics, Moscow. My research interests implement such topics as media, ideology, mechanisms of social opinion forming and computational linguistics.

Stefan Hechl

I am an MA student in contemporary history at the University of Innsbruck (Austria), currently working on my thesis on Austrian nation building in historical newspapers. Since 2018, I have been working in the H2020 project NewsEye, which is attempting to improve access to digitised newspaper archives across Europe. This was my first contact with digital humanities and led to my interest in the Helsinki Hackathon. My main goal is to learn more about methods of digital humanities and data science and to share my knowledge of humanities research with people working in computer science.

Suhas Thejaswi

I am a computer science PhD Student at Aalto University. My research work involve design and analysis of algorithms for its complexity, scalability and parallelization potential, furthermore applying these algorithms for large-scale data analysis. I am curious to explore how to apply theoretical methodologies for the analysis of political debates and its applications in digital humanities.

Team leaders

Fredrik Norén

Fredrik Norén is PhD in media and communication and work as a first assistant researcher at Humlab, the center for digital humanities at Umeå University. In his dissertation ”The Future Belongs to the Information Officers”: The Formation of Governmental Information in Sweden 1965–1975 (2019) Norén investigated how governmental information was debated and practiced in the borderland between different societal spheres. His research is primarily focused on media historical perspectives on governmental communication, and on the use of digital methods to analyze large-scale text collections. Recent publications include ”Distant reading the history of Swedish film politics in 4500 governmental SOU reports” (Scandinavian Journal of Cinema, 2017) and ”Urban catastrophe and sheltered salvation: The media system of Swedish civil defence, 1937–1960” (Media History, 2018). He is currently part of a large scale text analysis project called Welfare State Analytics that will analyze the Swedish society 1945–1990 through massive text collections connected to politics, media an culture.

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The Past and the Future in European Parliamentary Debates. What is our idea?

Wehave a huge dataset to explore ‒ 247,955 documents of the parliamentary debates translations , in original language and in English from 1999 till 2017. All the documents include speaker information such as name, country, date of birth, gender, function and also date of the speech and even link to the video (who has ever watched it?).

So, we need to decide what to do with all of these data and how to find something significant among the plethora of speeches. We have started with dozens of questions and discussed its until we narrowed them to our main question.

How does the European Parliament talk about ‘the future’ and ‘the past’?

Why we have chosen this perspective? Because it is universal and creates a framework for discussing over issues even vital values and notions. We want to analyze how MEPs speak about the past and the future and what ideas they connect with such a broad and essential concepts.

We are also going to investigate how these ideas change over time, how do they differ between political parties, fractions, ages, genders, geographical regions, etc?

How we intend to achieve our goal? As we are an interdisciplinary team, each of us can contribute their competencies to the overall result and this helps us to set a list of methods we will use:

  • Sentiment Analysis
  • Topic model
  • Construction grammar network keyword extraction
  • Word embedding
  • Collocation
  • Word frequency trends

Follow our blog to know first our key findings and our methodology and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.