Trawling for Terrorists: A Big Data Analysis of Conceptual Meanings and Contexts in Swedish Newspapers

The conceptual history of terrorism has to a significant extent been studied through canonical texts or historical key figures or organisations. However, through the increasing digitization of text materials convential research questions can now be approached from new angles or established results verified on the basis of exhaustive collections of data, rather than limited samples. Specifically, we are interested in evaluating and expanding on prior research claims regarding the meanings and contexts associated with the concepts terrorism and terrorist up until the twentieth century in a Swedish context. The investigation is guided by the following research questions: What historical meanings of the concept of terrorism were expressed in the Swedish newspaper discourse? What social and ideological contexts and violent political practices was the concept primarily associated with before the First World War?

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