This study investigates the changing contexts in which the word ireland appears in the Hansard Corpus of British parliamentary debates. It combines the use of two statistical techniques for analysis and visualization of historical data (Meaning Fluctuation Analysis and sparklines) with a more qualitative examination of concordance lines from the corpus. The full historical context of the patterns observed in the parliamentary data is also provided. We show that the sophisticated corpus techniques have the ability to draw our attention to important points in the time series, which need to be further investigated within the context of the larger historical picture.
Abercrombie, David. 1963. Pseudo-procedures in linguistics. STUF – Language Typology and Universals 16(1–4). 9–12.
Alexander, Marc & Mark Davies. 2015. The Hansard Corpus 1803–2005. [URL] (16 December, 2016.)
Anderson, James & Ian Shuttleworth. 1998. Sectarian demography, territoriality and political development in Northern Ireland. Political Geography 17(2). 187–208.
Boyce, D. George. 1996. The Irish Question and British politics, 1868–1996. Basingstoke, Hampshire & London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Boyle, Phelim P. & Cormac Ó Gráda. 1986. Fertility trends, excess mortality, and the Great Irish Famine. Demography 23(4). 543–562.
Brezina, Vaclav, Tony McEnery & Helen Baker. In preparation. Meaning fluctuation analysis: A new way of analysing shifts in historical discourse.
Brinton, Laurel J. 2001. Historical discourse analysis. In Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton & Deborah Schiffrin (eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis, 138–160. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cairns, Ed & John Darby. 1998. The conflict in Northern Ireland: Causes, consequences, and controls. American Psychologist 53(7). 754–760.
Clark, Gemma. 2014. Everyday violence in the Irish Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clark, Samuel. 1979. Social origins of the Irish Land War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Coogan, Tim Pat. 1995. The Troubles: Ireland’s ordeal 1966–1995 and the search for peace. London: Hutchinson.
Cronin, Mike. 2001. A history of Ireland. Basingstoke, Hampshire & London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cullen, L. M. 1972. An economic history of Ireland since 1660. London: B. T. Batsford.
Daly, Mary E. 1986. The famine in Ireland. Dundalk: Dundalgan Press.
Diggle, P. J. 2000. Overview of statistical methods for disease mapping and its relationship to cluster detection. In Paul Elliott, Jon C. Wakefield, Nicola G. Best & David J. Briggs (eds.), Spatial epidemiology: Methods and applications, 87–103. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fitzpatrick, David. 2013. Ethnic cleansing, ethical smearing and Irish historians. History 88(329). 135–144.
Goldstrom, J. M. 1981. Irish agriculture and the Great Famine. In J. M. Goldstrom & L. A. Clarkson (eds.), Irish population, economy and society: Essays in honour of the late K. H. Connell, 155–172. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Green, E. R. R. 1956. Agriculture. In R. Dudley Edwards & T. Desmond Williams (eds.), The Great Famine: Studies in Irish history, 1845–1852, 89–128. Dublin: Lilliput Press.
Gries, Stefan Th. & Martin Hilpert. 2008. The identification of stages in diachronic data: Variability-based neighbour clustering. Corpora 3(1). 59–81.
Gwet, Kilem. 2002. Inter-rater reliability: Dependency on trait prevalence and marginal homogeneity. Statistical Methods for Inter-Rater Reliability Assessment Series 2. 1–9.
Hilpert, Martin & Stefan Th. Gries. 2009. Assessing frequency changes in multistage diachronic corpora: Applications for historical corpus linguistics and the study of language acquisition. Literary and Linguistic Computing 24(4). 385–401.
Hoppen, K. Theodore. 1989. Ireland since 1800: Conflict and conformity. London & New York: Longman.
Mawe, Timothy. 2012. A comparative survey of the historical debates surrounding Ireland, World War I and the Irish Civil War. Online supplement to History Studies 13, [URL] (16 December, 2016.)
McEnery, Tony & Helen Baker. 2016. Corpus linguistics and 17th-century prostitution: Computational linguistics and history. London: Bloomsbury.
McMahon, Sean. 2001. Rebel Ireland: From Easter Rising to Civil War. Cork: Mercier Press.
Mokyr, Joel. 1980. The deadly fungus: An econometric investigation into the short term demographic impact of the Irish Famine. Research in Population Economics 2. 237–277.
Nevalainen, Terttu. 1999. Making the best use of ‘bad’ data: Evidence for sociolinguistic variation in Early Modern English. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100(4). 499–533.
Nevalainen, Terttu & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 2017. Historical sociolinguistics: Language change in Tudor and Stuart England. Abingdon: Routledge.
Ó Gráda, Cormac. 1988. Ireland before and after the famine: Explorations in economic history, 1800–1925. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Regan, John M. 2010. Irish public histories as an historiographical problem. Irish Historical Studies 37(146). 265–292.
Rudwick, Martin. 2004. Scrope, George Julius Poulett (1797–1876). In H. C. G. Matthew & Brian Harrison (eds.), Oxford dictionary of national biography, Online edn. David Cannadine, (ed.), October 2007. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2024. Climate change in the UK press: Examining discourse fluctuation over time. Applied Linguistics 45:1 ► pp. 111 ff.
Johansson, Mathias & Betto van Waarden
2024. Structural reading: Developing the method of Structural Collocation Analysis using a case study on parliamentary reporting. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 57:3 ► pp. 185 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.