photo: Risto Turunen
The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Risto Turunen, a doctoral student at the University of Tampere, describes his research on The Newspaper and Periodical Corpus of the National Library of Finland.
I am Risto Turunen. I am working on a doctoral thesis in History at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Tampere.
In 1907, the biggest socialist party was in Finland. I study the breakthrough of socialism especially from the linguistic viewpoint. What kind of discourse, concept structure or political language did Finnish socialism actually have? Working-class press was especially efficient in sowing the socialist seed in the people. Almost all Finnish newspapers have been digitized up until 1910. Because the papers are machine-readable, I can study the socialist language on the macro level with quantitative methods.
I have studied these newspapers in the Language Bank’s Korp interface. For example, I can find out when ”socialism” as a word became common in the press in general or which papers discussed ”socialism” the most. In addition, I have compared the linguistic occurrence context of ”socialism” in socialist and non-socialist papers. The comparison reveals what kind of meanings did the proponents and opponents of the ideology try to associate with the word.
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.
