Digging Deeper into the Finnish Parliamentary Protocols: Using a Lexical Semantic Tagger for Studying Meaning Change of Everyman’s Rights (allemansrätten)

This paper analyses the protocols of the Parliament of Finland 1907–2000. They have been digitised and published as open data by the Finnish Parliament in 20181. In the analysis we use a novel tool, a semantic tagger for Finnish – FiST [1]. We describe the tagger generally and show results of semantic analysis both on the whole of the parliamentary corpus and on a small subset of data where everyman’s rights (a widely used right of public access to nature) have been the main topic of parliamentary discussions. Our analysis contributes to the understanding of the development of this “tradition” of public access rights, and is also the first study utilizing the Finnish semantic tagger as a tool for content analysis in digital humanities research. Keyword search shows first that that the discussion of everyman’s rights has had three different peak periods in the Finnish Parliament: 1946, 1973, and 1992. Secondly, the contents of the discussions have different nature for all the periods, which could be clearly detected with FiST and keyness analysis.