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|title=Codifying the Debates of the Riksdag: Towards a Framework for Semi-automatic Annotation of Swedish Parliamentary Discourse
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3133/paper12.pdf
|volume=Vol-3133
|authors=Mats Fridlund,Daniel Brodén,Leif-Jöran Olsson,Magnus P. Ängsal
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/dhn/FridlundBOA22
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==Codifying the Debates of the Riksdag: Towards a Framework for Semi-automatic Annotation of Swedish Parliamentary Discourse==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3133/paper12.pdf
Codifying the Debates of the Riksdag:
Towards a Framework for Semi-automatic Annotation of
Swedish Parliamentary Discourse
Mats Fridlund, Daniel Brodén, Leif-Jöran Olsson and Magnus P. Ängsal
University of Gothenburg, Renströmsgatan 6, Gothenburg, 405 30, Sweden
Abstract
This study provides an exploratory attempt to develop a framework for how to semi-automatically
annotate salient topics in Swedish parliamentary debate. The discussion is grounded in the ongoing
digital humanities project SweTerror that studies the terrorism discourse in the Riksdag 1968–2018
through a mixed-methods approach. The paper presents our tentative framework through its three
main categories: metadata, language data and frame data. While the first two categories are mostly
generic and their data could mainly be automatically extracted, the third category is contextual and
requires manual interpretation. We discuss the design of the latter through the theoretical concept
of ‘framing’ and illustrate the framework’s overall principles through a case study of utterances in
the debates 1968–1970 concerning terrorism. We conclude by suggesting that it may be more
generally applicable for studies of parliamentary debates in HSS research if further modified for the
particular research purposes.
Keywords 1
Terrorism studies; language technology; parliamentary data; parliamentary debate
1. Introduction
As in many European countries, Swedish parliamentary records are digitized and freely available
(http://data.riksdagen.se), making the study of political discourse ripe for data-driven research. This
study explores the task of devising an annotation framework for mixed-methods humanities and social
science (HSS) research using parliamentary data. Its origin is the ongoing research project Terrorism
in Swedish Politics (SweTerror) that has raised interest in the possibility of constructing a general
framework for semi-automatic annotation of salient topics in the parliamentary discourse. The aim of
the paper is to discuss our exploratory work on such a framework, drawing on a limited case study of
‘terrorism’ as a topic in the Swedish parliamentary debate 1968–1970.
In the following, we outline a three-category framework for semi-automatic annotation. We situate
the discussion in the context of the SweTerror project and the Swedish parliamentary constitution
during the period in focus. We present the framework through its three main data categories: metadata,
language data, and frame data. The first two are general or generic and could to a large extent be
automatically extracted, using computational resources, while the third is almost entirely dependent on
manual annotation. The frame data category is designed to facilitate contextual discourse analysis of a
specific topic or issue in the parliamentary debate, in our case study ‘terrorism’. We present this
category through some theoretical distinctions concerning the concepts of framing and terrorism, which
Digital Parliamentary Data in Action (DiPaDA 2022) workshop, Uppsala, Sweden, March 15, 2022.
EMAIL: mats.fridlund@gu.se (Mats Fridlund); daniel.broden@gu.se (Daniel Brodén); leif-joran.olsson@gu.se (Leif-Jöran Olsson);
magnus.pettersson.angsal@gu.se (Magnus P. Ängsal)
ORCID: 0000-0002-5759-0027 (Mats Fridlund); 0000-0002-5914-1516 (Daniel Brodén); 0000-0001-7107-4101 (Leif-Jöran Olsson); 0000-
0001-5996-5067 (Magnus P. Ängsal)
© 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
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have guided its design. Then, we discuss the framework’s possibilities through concrete examples
concerning terrorism in the Parliamentary debate 1968–1970. We conclude by suggesting how this
tentative framework may be more generally applicable for HSS studies of parliamentary discourse.
2. Mixed-methods study of political discourse
While many research initiatives within the digital humanities have been conducted with either a
computational or HSS focus, the aim of the SweTerror project is to truly combine HSS and language
and speech technology domain expertise. Combining digital and interpretative methodologies, the
project studies the sustained role of terrorism in Swedish politics 1968–2018, and, in particular, the
deliberations of the Diet in the Swedish Parliament, Riksdag [1].
The Riksdag of the Estates was in 1866 reconstituted as a bicameral legislature and later in 1971 as
a unicameral legislature. Thus, the period 1968–1970 studied in this paper, was the final years of the
bicameral Riksdag when it consisted of the First Chamber, with 155 Members of Parliament (MPs) and
the Second Chamber, with 233 MPs. The Swedish electoral system proportionately reflects the
electorate’s divisions in the elected body and during this period, six parties were represented in the
Parliament: the Centre Party (C); the Liberal People’s Party (FP); the Moderate Coalition Party (M);
Civic Unity (MBS, only 1964–1968); the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Sweden (S); and the
Left Party – the Communists (VPK). Historically, Swedish politics has been dominated by the Left-
Right conflict, with the political parties understood as either belonging to the Left or to the Right.
Our study concerns the parliamentary communication form ‘Speeches’ (anföranden), i.e. public
speeches and replies by MPs in the debates of the two chambers, as represented by their digitized
transcripts available at the Riksdag website riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/. Specifically, in the
debates MPs rhetorically argue and present their politics, raise issues, question or support government
policies, etc. An MP may participate in debates without approval from the party leadership, or by being
restricted by formal rules. The most common speeches are interpellation, parliamentary business and
debates on general policies. MPs who initiate a debate can speak longer, while MPs can briefly reply to
any speech. On a general level these exchanges of meaning are the opportunities that MPs have at
disposal to review, control and to hold the government accountable [2]. In international perspective, the
Swedish debates have been described as steering at verifying facts and technical in nature, with
emotional outbursts being rare [3]. The speeches are transcribed and made public shortly after the
debates. However, they are not transcribed exactly as spoken but edited for readability, formality and
clarity and it has not been uncommon for the stenographers to include speakers’ manuscripts into the
debate protocols. Focus has been to represent the speaker’s intended meaning rather than their in/exact
wording [4, 5].
3. Metadata – identifying the salient documentary information
The starting point is that we ‘trawl’ through a corpus of parliamentary speeches for keywords signifying
the topic under study (topical keywords), in our case potential terrorism-related terms, identified as
containing the lexeme terror. In our case material during 1968–1970, we identified a substantial number
of keyword hits (71 words used in 68 sentences in 35 speeches uttered by 36 different speakers). In the
illustrations of the framework’s three data categories, we show only the five first and last of the 71 hits
(see Figures 1–3). Notably, in our analysis the salient topic in the debate is primarily represented and
understood through its core terms (‘terrorism’ and other closely related keywords), rather than
synonyms or homonyms (‘urban guerilla’, ‘violent extremism’, etc.), which an extended analysis should
also take into account.
A first step towards creating a framework that enables a detailed analysis of parliamentary debates
is to select metadata labels to annotate basic parameters related to the document context for each word
occurrence; the when (date), where (Chamber), why (what debate) a specific occurrence took place as
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well as who (speaker, party, government party member) uttered the word was attributed to and their
formal role (position) (Figure 1).
We chose to include the following labels in our metadata category, of which several of the data types
may be generated semi-automatically from the available open data (in italics):
● ID: unique identifier for each speech utterance (e.g., No. 3 with ID 196801182002) where the
identifier includes date (19680118), Chamber (2) – First or Second – where the debate took
place, and the utterance’s order (002) in the debate (sole/first, second, third, etc. terrorism-
related occurrence in the debate);
● Date: the date of the speech according to ISO 8601;
● Chamber: whether speech given in first or second chamber (only relevant 1866–1971);
● Debate: title of the specific debate in which the speech occurred;
● Person: speaker’s surname and last name;
● Party: speaker’s party affiliation;
● Gender: speaker’s gender;
● Government party (Y/N): whether the speaker is a member of a party in government;
● Position: the speaker’s formal role in Parliament (ordinary MP [ledamot], group leader, party
leader, Minister, Prime Minister), leaving out that party leaders, Ministers and PMs most often
are also MPs.
While these labels are more or less self-evident, it should be noted that the label of ‘Government
party’ (Regeringsparti) is highly significant in that MPs from government parties tend to use the
opportunity to give speeches in the chamber to a lesser extent than MPs from oppositional parties.
Figure 1: Metadata annotation scheme, exemplified with the five first and last of all 71 terror-word
occurrences in the Swedish parliamentary debate 1968-70
Two main ideas lie behind the construction of the metadata category. The first is that the category’s
labels could be understood as ‘basic’ when it comes to the information they hold for analytical
extractions. Second, that the majority of their informational content may be automatically generated
and extracted from the Riksdag’s Open Data or other parliamentary databases. A few labels (‘Gender’,
‘Government party’ or ‘Position’) may be generated semi-automatically through the manual
determination of their content using external databases, including wikipedia.se and the online version
of Swedish Biographical Dictionary (Svenskt biografiskt lexikon). It is expected that we will in the
future be able to automatically determine the data in these labels through enriched curation of
parliamentary data from such databases or through linked-open-data (LOD) functionalities.
4. Language data – focusing on linguistic attributions and determinants
The second framework category concerns language data about the associated meanings and attributions
of the concept in focus, in our case ‘terrorism’ (Figure 2). This data of a term’s linguistic determinants,
suffixes, affixes, prefixes, etc., could all in principle be machine-generated.
The process of designating and producing these determinants should ideally not involve further
manual interpretative choices and restrictions beyond those already built-into the corpus and the corpus
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tools used. Thus, the following framework is based on the premise that these functionalities are already
implemented or could be implemented with a limited effort (italicized in list below).
Figure 2: Language data annotation scheme, exemplified for parliamentary terror-word occurrences
The following linguistic and speech-contextual labels are used in the language data category:
● Topical keyword (Tematiskt nyckelord): all found variants of the topical word expression
being searched for;
● KWIC: the close context, the keyword in the sentence, where the expression occurs;
● Paragraph: the full paragraph where the expression occurs;
● Basic form (Grundform): in the present study either terror or terrorism;
● Premodifying attribute (Förställt attribut): usually specificity of e.g. range or grade in
relation to the expression’s subject;
● Postmodifying attribute (Efterställt attribut): usually specificity of e.g. how or where in
relation to the expression’s subject;
● Syntactic function (Satsdel): the syntactic function that the expression enacts in the specific
clause in which it occurs;
● Part of speech (Ordklass): the expression’s part-of-speech;
● Clause subject (Satssubjekt): the subject of the sentence/context the expression is used, which
is in our case often the agent of terrorism (see below);
● Clause object (Satssubjekt): object on the sentence/context the expression is used, which is in
our case often the victim/target of terrorism (see below);
● Finite verb: the finite verb, or the closest verbal expression in the clause;
● Tense (tempus) in which the expression is used, which could indicate whether the concept
(terrorism) is being described as a past, present, or (potential) future reality;
● Topic salience (Intensitet): how many times the topical keyword is used in a specific debate in
the respective chamber:
● Attitude: positive or negative attitude expressed, usually in relation to the subject/matter of the
utterance;
● Reference: is the topical keyword used in reference to a prior statement by someone other than
speaker;
● Positioning: whether the topical keyword from the perspective of the speaker is considered
appropriate or not in relation to the political actualities in focus (e.g. ‘so called terrorism’);
● Metaphorical: whether the keyword is used in a metaphorical rather than literal sense.
Currently, the Swedish Parliament provides original data with annotations from the years 1993–
2018, including title, speaker, party affiliation, reply and interested parties (riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-
lagar/), and in machine-readable format on (data.riksdagen.se). Substantial sections of the Swedish
parliamentary data have already been annotated and curated for analysis with language technology tools
by Språkbanken Text, the text division of the research infrastructure The National Language Bank of
Sweden (Nationella Språkbanken), and made accessible through the online corpus system Korp [6].
The language technological enrichment of the Korp parliamentary corpora should, in principle, to a
large degree allow the data in the non-italicized labels to be extracted and used from the currently
existing annotations of these corpora, or enriched with some additional annotations in the future.
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5. Frame data – inquiring into contextual meanings
To be able to explore salient meanings that the topical keyword (terrorism) represents when used by
speakers in the Parliament, its situated meanings need to be annotated. Thus, the framework’s third
category, frame data, concerns elements more contextual than those previously described. Before
discussing this category, we will consider some basic distinctions of the concepts of framing and
terrorism, that have guided its design.
5.1. Framing as a structuring concept
According to Minsky [7], a frame is essentially a cognitive phenomenon and more specifically, ‘a data-
structure for representing a stereotyped situation’ associated with a certain set of typical activities, acts
and events. When encountering a situation, an event or suchlike, one draws on elements from memory
in order to understand it. Thus, memory provides a set of habitual knowledge elements that help
interpret and contextualize the situation or event.
Scholars in linguistics and media and communication studies have further developed the concept of
framing [8]. A key notion is that certain frames are invoked by and entangled with words and other
linguistic units, and furthermore, that the frames themselves select elements and are thereby a matter of
highlighting and downplaying certain cognitive aspects. An influential conceptualization states that
framing means ‘to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a
communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation,
moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.’ [9]. Recent linguistics
elaborations emphasize that there can be no language use without frames; any verbal act is embedded
in an interpretive framework [10]. To inquire into frames, then, means asking for how frames are
conceptually filled, understood as basic ‘slots’ within the frame.
5.2. ‘Terrorism’ as frame
We now demonstrate how to construct the frame for a political topic, ‘terrorism’, and what elements
are required to render it meaningful, i.e. what slots are entailed in the ‘terrorism’ frame, and how they
are conceptually filled in linguistic acts.
‘Terrorism’ is a contested concept notoriously hard to define, not least as the term is used in radically
conflicting ways by different actors. Our understanding of terrorism follows Jackson’s ‘minimal
foundationalist definition’, that terrorism is ‘violence or its threat intended as a symbolically
communicative act in which the direct victims of the action is instrumentalized as a means to creating
a psychological effect of intimidation and fear in a target audience for a political objective’ [11].
Following this, terrorism includes a perceived threat of a violent act. Second, an agent – a terrorist – is
required. Third, there needs to be a political target (victim or object, mål) of the terror act, and fourth,
a place where the attack is spatially situated. Finally, an ideological or political motive has to be
assumed, since terrorism is understood as a ‘symbolically communicative act’ with ‘a political
objective’. These five slots constitute the basic terrorism frame, although it should be stressed that they
in political debates are to a significant extent filled with perceived rather than experienced meanings.
5.3. Contextualizing the frame of ‘terrorism’
The frame data category serves as a representation of context-specific elements of the concept in focus,
providing answers to the question how its ‘slots’ are conceptually constituted (to the extent that this can
be broken down and traced in the data) (Figure 3). When it comes to the concept of terrorism, we may
be able to fill the slots in its frame by answering some key questions: what actions are framed as
terrorism, who are the alleged agents and their victims, what are their political motives and political as
well as geographical contexts?
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Figure 3: Frame annotation scheme, exemplified for Swedish parliamentary terror-word occurrences
Against the background of the ambiguity of the concept of terrorism, we have opted for structuring
the answers in the following labels:
● Act: what specific kind of threatening or actual violence or tactic of terrorism is referred to;
● Agent: the individual, collective or state agent referred to as performing the terrorist act;
● Target: the target (individual, group or object) of the terrorist act;
● Place: the specific location or country where the terrorist act is situated;
● Motive: the motivations or ideology of the terrorist agent.
Furthermore, we have used five complementary labels to clearly characterize the contextual
conditions of the various forms of (alleged) terrorism found in the frame:
● Terrorism typology: type of terrorism distinguished between apolitical, non-violent or
metaphorical terror (O) and violent political terror, with the political terror either in the form of
(state) regime terrorism (R) or (non-state) rebel terrorism, which in its turn is classified
according to the severity of its violence as either politically motivated less-lethal violence,
threats and intimidation (H) or systematic political violence and killing (T); the latter being the
primary recognized type of ‘terrorism’ in contemporary society;
● Domestic (Y/N): whether the terror-related activities occurred in Sweden or abroad;
● Nationality: the nationality of the terrorist perpetrator (Swedish, foreign, binational,
multinational or global (individual/groups);
● Policy area(s): the policy area that the word ‘terrorism’ is connected to when used in the speech
(regardless of the debate’s given formal policy area);
● Event/s: the conflict(s), contemporary or historical, the usage of the term relates to;
● Terrorist tropes: imaginative tropes for the discursive meaning-making about terrorism
(‘Soviet-backed terrorism’, ’US blow-back terrorism’, ‘false-flag terrorism’, etc.).
Due to the contextual nature of the labels and data, the frame data category is dependent on ‘manual’
interpretation. Nevertheless, the category and its set of labels will be made available in a resource of
manually annotated material for language technology training and evaluation purposes.
6. Keyhole views of the parliamentary terrorism frame 1968–1970
To demonstrate the possibilities of our framework, we will look at how the terrorism frame can be
traced through inquiries into the manifestation of its elements in the parliamentary debate 1968–1970.
We provide three ‘keyhole views’, using the data for the 5 first and the 5 last hits 1968–1970 (i.e. in
total 10 out of the 71 hits of terrorism-related words). The range of these views are rather limited, but
they, nevertheless, provide entry points towards a better understanding of the development of the
Swedish discourse of terrorism at a particular point in time.
The concept of terrorism, despite long being used to designate various forms of political terror in a
wide sense in Sweden and internationally, became the preferred label for a range of acts of political
violence that we today associate it with first in the early 1970s [12, 13, 14]. Notably, terrorism was
explicitly recognized as a domestic threat in Sweden only after the period in focus. At the same time
several of the specific acts of political violence that became associated with terrorism manifested or
prefigured themselves in 1968. For example, in April founding members of the Red Army Faction
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(RAF) fire bombed a department store in Germany, and in July the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP) hijacked El Al Flight 426. Furthermore, anti-colonial wars raged in Vietnam and other
Third World countries, foregrounding terror violence against civilians and fueling left-wing militancy
in the West, which contributed to the transition in 1968 from an Anti-Colonial wave of terrorism to a
New Left wave [15].
Consequently, our case study concerns a transitional phase in the understanding of terrorism and it
thus seeks to map emerging frame elements that to some extent prefigure the general discourse in the
1970s. The data in the annotation framework indicate that terrorism was not a major political concept,
but, nevertheless, sometimes used by MPs. The majority of the speakers in the Parliament that discussed
the topic of political terrorism – 3 out of the 7 who provided our exemplifying 10 utterances – were
prominent politicians (party group leaders or party leader). Furthermore, the metadata shows that
terrorism was an issue of concern primarily for parties on the right (7 politicians) and opposition (10)
rather than on the left (1) or the government (0). (A cursory look shows this trend in principle stands
for all the 71 hits 1968–1970).
6.1. Shifting semantics – from terror to terrorism
One of the main things shown by our data, is an indication of an often mentioned but little researched
semantic shift concerning the rise of the concept of terrorism in the years around 1970. Previously the
word ‘terror’ had dominated the discourse on the types of political violence today discussed in terms of
terrorism and it was primarily used in relation to violence perpetrated by state actors, i.e. what nowadays
would be called state terrorism. Out of the exemplifying 5 first and 5 last hits in our material, the
language data category shows an overwhelming use of the word terror (9) simplexes and compounds
rather than terrorism (1). But terrorism is also starting to appear and generate additional and alternative
meanings, compared to its traditional uses.
While ‘terror’ is used in speeches both in 1968 and 1970, ‘terrorism’ started being used first in 1970.
Rather than being coincidental, this seems to reflect a shift in meaning that researchers have traced to
the early 1970s and new configurations of militancy and guerilla warfare [14]. The noun ‘terrorism’
and the verb ‘terrorizing’ (terrorisera) are used in our material to designate sub-state terrorism and even
the possibility of domestic Swedish sub-state terrorism, rather than foreign regime terrorism (a search
of all speeches 1945-1970 shows ‘terrorism’ appearing only five times, twice in 1948 and 1960 in
relation to Soviet and French 20th century state terrorism, respectively, and thrice in 1970 for sub-state
terrorism in Sweden and Portugal). At the same time, the word terror merges into compounds, such as
terrororganisationer (1970–11–11), related to new forms of sub-state terrorism which may be taken as
a harbinger of the wider uses of terror- and terrorism-related words in the 1970s.
6.2. Shifting locations – from global to local terror
As stated above, there is a trend toward using the word terrorism in relation to the domestic Swedish
context. This is also demonstrated by the frame data where the ‘agent’ and ‘place’ slots begin to include
Swedish citizens and localities in addition to foreign elements. The majority of the data in ‘Place’
designate African and Asian locations, but with some notable exceptions. Actually the first occurrence
in 1968 is a reference to Swedish political left-wing extremists who ‘terrorize’ Swedish citizens: ‘It
however serves no purpose whatsoever if some persons with extreme views wants to act superior and
terrorize other citizens with demonstrations in non-allowed places in disorderly forms’ (1968–01–18,
our translation). When examining the context of this utterance, one finds that the activities that the
speaker is referring to include political threats by ‘wrongheaded persons’, but also attacks on diplomats
from other countries that may have ‘dangerous consequences. These words of warning could be
regarded as prescient insofar as the 1971 occupation of the Yugoslavian consulate in Gothenburg and
the later killing of the Yugoslavian Ambassador in Stockholm by Croatian separatists became regarded
as the first terrorist incidents in modern day Sweden, adding Stockholm and Sweden to the ‘Place’ slot
of the terrorism frame.
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6.3. Shifting motivations – from anti-colonial to leftist terrorism
In the parliamentary debates we can see from the frame category that the word ‘terror’ is prominently
used in connection to violent anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia, the Vietnam war in particular.
This can be illustrated by an utterance by a right party (M) MP regarding the violent struggle of African
subjects to the Portuguese empire and the Portuguese authorities’ explanations thereof: ‘Furthermore
they emphasize that they experience that the terrorism that these [Portuguese Asian and African] areas
are exposed to, as being organized by outside countries, among others outside of Africa. They
themselves name and point to that there is Communist interests, that the Soviet Union is an arms
supplier and that in the Portuguese Guinea Cuban military is appearing in the terror organizations’
(1970–11–11, our translation).
A close reading of the debate’s further exchange reveals the existence of an ideological tension in
the semantics of terrorism. Contrary, an MP to the left (S) uses the more positive sounding ‘freedom
struggle’ (frihetskamp) to describe the militancy in the Portuguese colonial areas in Africa. The
polarization between the words terrorism and freedom struggle, or terrorist and freedom fighter, became
central to the discursive conflict over the semantics of terrorism and something we expect to explore
further as it diversifies in the 1970s into other colonial and political contexts.
This pejorative use of the terrorism word and the associations made to Communism among MPs to
the right can be implicitly found already in the above-quoted speech from 1968, in which an MP (C)
warns about Swedish extremists who want to ‘terrorize other citizens with demonstrations’. A similar
criticism against the left can be found again in 1970 in a speech by a liberal (FP) MP: ‘When the new-
old Left wants to defend violent methods it cannot be mixed up with equivocation for terrorism’ (1970-
10-29, our translation). A close reading of the quote paragraph however reveals that the statement is
meant to be sarcastic and intending to say that the New Left actually advocates terrorism. In fact, it
draws on and borrows from a larger debate in the press on the New Left’s views on political violence
and ‘the role of violence as a means of struggle [kampmedel] in democratic societies’. Thus, the media
debate seems to have fed into the debate in the Parliament during what appears as a transitional phase
for the parliamentary frame of terrorism.
In general, these results point to the analytical gains of taking a context-sensitive approach that
extends further than the sentence level and data generated by the semi-automatic extraction. By also
performing close readings of the textual context of the debates (and beyond), we are able to more deeply
understand the discursive development of the parliamentary debate about terrorism.
7. Conclusion and further research
This paper has developed a tentative framework for how to semi-automatically annotate salient topics
in the Swedish parliamentary debate. We have presented the framework’s three main categories:
metadata, language data and frame data, that each describe different dimensions of the concept in focus.
The metadata category annotates basic parameters relevant to the documentary context of the topical
keyword; the when, where, why, who of each utterance. The language data category concerns the
concept’s linguistic attributions and determinants, which, similar to the framework’s first data category,
to a significant extent could be automatically generated. The frame data category, however, is distinctly
contextual and thus requires manual interpretation. This category concerns more specific contextual
multi-dimensional meanings associated with the concept in focus and its underlying idea is presented
through the linguistic framing concept. Furthermore, we have illustrated the framework’s possibilities
through concrete examples from debates touching on terrorism 1968–1970.
As our annotation framework is decidedly tentative, it should be expected that the categories could
be further developed and that their labels likely will be further modified in tandem with the empirical
analysis in the ongoing SweTerror project. It has, as of yet, not been tested and evaluated.
We would however suggest that this tentative annotation framework might be more widely
applicable for representing parliamentary discourses on other salient topics besides terrorism. It could
also be developed to include other types of parliamentary communication, e.g. government bills and
motions by MPs. The metadata category provides a generic framework for parliamentary data in
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general, as its set of labels could be regarded as basic when it comes to the information they hold for
analytical extractions. At the same time, this category could be extended to include additional labels
and data for other research purposes. The same applies for the language data category. The frame
category, however, is more complex in context of general applicability. While the concept of ‘framing’
holds general promise as a reference point for the structuring of contextually bound data, the labels
included in this category are partly dependent on the topic under investigation. The labels we use should,
nevertheless, to some extent be applicable to other frames as most political concepts consist of a
spectrum of various ‘types’, have varying degrees of internationalism’, are used within multiple policy
areas, are connected to specific events and larger tropes, etc. Thus, if modified and revised, the labels
in this category may be used to address other research purposes.
8. Acknowledgements
SweTerror is part of the Digitisation and Accessibility to Cultural Heritage Collections (DIGARV)
program funded by the Swedish Research Council, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and the Royal Swedish
Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities (digarv.se/en/). This work is also supported by the national
e-infrastructure The National Language Bank and Swe-Clarin funded partly by the Swedish Research
Council (under contract no. 2017-00626).
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