A data-driven approach to the changing vocabulary of the ‘nation’ in English, Dutch, Swedish and Finnish newspapers, 1750-1950

This project aims to mine two centuries worth of digitised newspapers in four languages, and to propose a methodologically sound, reusable approach to carry out quality historical research on the changing vocabulary relating to nationhood. The newspapers stem from different sources and countries, and are available in different formats. Massive digitized newspaper collections are increasingly used to address historical questions through mining textual data. They are more seldom used for comparative projects cross linguistic and national boundaries. In this paper, we address the methodological challenges the use of newspapers from different political contexts, languages and datasets poses, and lay out our approach to tackle a comparative study for the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and the UK.