photo: Mika Federley
The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Jani Marjanen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki describes his research on The Newspaper and Periodical Corpus of the National Library of Finland.
I am Jani Marjanen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. My doctoral thesis is in the field of history, and presently I am working as a researcher at the Centre for Nordic Studies.
I am studying how political concepts were used in the Finnish context during the so called Political Night in 1809–1863. During that period, many ideological concepts such as liberalism, socialism and conservatism became integral parts of political discussion in Europe. Many written constitutions were also introduced at that time, and their symbolical significance as political instruments increased. The situation in Finland was peculiar because no body of political representation assembled during that period. These subjects were, however, present in Finnish discussion as well, partly privately, but also in newspapers, for example.
In my research, I use historical digitized newspapers in Swedish and Finnish. The corpus has been digitized by the National Library and is also available in the Language Bank’s Korp interface.
Korp’s search features allow inspection of broader trends in political language. Because the results of optical character recognition in the corpus contains many errors, I need the regular expressions enabled by Korp for assembling the corpus.
Information about how The Newspaper and Periodical Corpus of the National Library of Finland was compiled (in Finnish)
The FIN-CLARIN consortium consists of a group of Finnish universities along with CSC – IT Center for Science and the Institute for the Languages of Finland. FIN-CLARIN helps the researchers in Finland to use, to refine, to preserve and to share their language resources. The Language Bank of Finland is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.
All previously published Language Bank researcher interviews are stored in the Researcher of the Month archive.
