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Text Mining the British Hansard

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War and Happiness
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Abstract

This chapter discusses the methodology and the results of the psycholinguistic text mining of the British Hansard, 1830–2004 (a corpus of approximately 1.6 billion words). The key tool deployed is the internal dictionary in the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC 2015) program from which the book derives a list of 158 words indicative of the emotion of sadness. This chapter determines the annual frequencies of those words within the Hansard corpus and examines their relation to key events. The relevant data from Hansard is compared with other data concerning the British population as a whole, such as self-reported life satisfaction and income inequality.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Available at: https://www.hansard-corpus.org/.

  2. 2.

    Robert Self, Neville Chamberlain: A Biography (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 339.

  3. 3.

    A. Mezulis, L. Abramson, J. Hyde, and B. Hankin, “Is There a Universal Positivity Bias in Attributions? A Meta-Analytic Review of Individual, Developmental, and Cultural Differences in Self-Serving Attributional Biases” Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 130, No. 5 (2004), pp. 711–747.

  4. 4.

    J. Pennebaker and C. Chung, “The Psychological Functions of Function Words” in K. Fiedler (ed.), Social Communication (New York: Psychology Press, 2007).

  5. 5.

    Alistair Baron, Paul Rayson, and Dawn Archer, “Word Frequency and Key Word Statistics in Historical Corpus Linguistics” Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (2009), pp. 41–67.

  6. 6.

    The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

  7. 7.

    Briefing Paper, No. CBP7529, August 23, 2017, “UK Election Statistics, 1918–2017, House of Commons Library, Available at: http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/CBP-7529.

  8. 8.

    See Chapter 1, footnote 6.

  9. 9.

    Available at: https://googlebooks.byu.edu/x.asp.

  10. 10.

    Susan David et al. (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 306.

  11. 11.

    J. David Singer, Stuart Bremer, and John Stuckey‚ “Capability Distribution, Uncertainty, and Major Power War, 1820–1965” in Bruce Russett (ed.), Peace, War, and Numbers (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1972), pp. 19–48.

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Correspondence to Peter S. Jenkins .

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Jenkins, P.S. (2019). Text Mining the British Hansard. In: War and Happiness. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14078-6_4

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