The “Spirit” in the Chamber: Capturing Zeitgeist in the UK Parliamentary debates

University of Sheffield (United Kingdom)

This research addresses the vagueness and traditional lack of empirical grounding in the concept of the zeitgeist by conceptualizing and operationalizing it as a measurable, data-backed linguistic construct. The robustness and generalizability of the approach is tested using Hansard, a comprehensive and semantically annotated corpus of British parliamentary debates spanning 1803 to 2005. Methodologically, the project employs a mixed-methods approach centered on a three-dimensional keyness analysis. By leveraging Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD) and advanced semantic tagging, this study extracts statistically significant keywords and semantic domains that define different periods, such as the transitions between the Callaghan, Thatcher, and Major governments. This bottom-up, large-scale data analysis mitigates the subjective “cherry-picking” of evidence often found in traditional humanities research. Ultimately, the project provides a rigorous framework for understanding how national concerns are co-constructed in legislative discourse, offering significant contributions to both conceptual history and corpus linguistics.

Expected results include: 1) A linguistically operational definition of the concept zeitgeist  2) A curated list of keywords and key semantic domains which co-construct the changing zeitgeist in the British parliament 3) A reproducible computational pipeline applicable to large diachronic corpora

Secondments: University of Glasgow, 3 months; thesaurus tools and lexicography development) in Year 2 & Computer-assisted exploration of lexicalisation through time (Cologne Digital Humanities Center for 3 months in Year 3