NER som ett källidentifieringsverktyg. Erfarenheter av svenska BERT för digital historia 1.25

Abstract

The paper explores my experiences of working with Named Entity Recognition (NER) in Swedish parliamentary records. As such, it provides a practical account of my methodology in employing the Swedish BERT and its NER functionality in a historical dataset. It also reflects on the relevance of this case to the broader relationship between digital and traditional intellectual history. The study described used NER to identify the geographical areas and placenames within Swedish parliamentary discourse from 1887 to 1914. Taken together, this list of locations could be used to determine the aggregate frequencies of geographical groupings, in this case predominantly nations. The quantitative findings were subsequently used to navigate the data set and identify the most relevant texts for qualitative, contextual close readings. This paper argues that there are strengths in employing digital tools but maintaining the framework of traditional intellectual history in accordance with ‘digital history 1.25’