A Multimodal Digital Humanities Study
of Terrorism in Swedish Politics:
An Interdisciplinary Mixed Methods Project
on the Configuration of Terrorism
in Parliamentary Debates, Legislation,
and Policy Networks 1968–2018
Jens Edlund
1,8
, Daniel Brodén
2,6
, Mats Fridlund
2,6(B )
, Cecilia Lindhé
2,6
,
Leif-Jöran Olsson
3,9
, Magnus P. Ängsal
4
, and Patrik Öhberg
5,7
1
KTH Speech, Music & Hearing, Department of Intelligent Systems, KTH Royal
Institute of Technology, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden
edlund@speech.kth.se
2
Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, University of Gothenburg,
405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden
mats.fridlund@gu.se
3
Department of Swedish, University of Gothenburg, 405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden
4
Department of Languages and Literatures, University of Gothenburg,
405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden
5
Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, 405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden
6
Centre for Digital Humanities, University of Gothenburg, 405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden
7
The SOM Institute, University of Gothenburg, 405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden
8
Språkbanken Tal, sprakbanken.speech.kth.se, Stockholm, Sweden
9
Språkbanken Text, spraakbanken.gu.se, Stockholm, Sweden
Abstract. This paper presents the design of one of Sweden’s largest dig-
ital humanities projects, SweTerror, that through an interdisciplinary multi-
modal methodological approach develops an extensive speech-to-text digital HSS
resource. SweTerror makes a major contribution to the study of terrorism in Swe-
den through a comprehensive mixed methods study of the political discourse on
terrorism since the late 1960s. Drawing on artificial intelligence in the form of
state-of-the-art language and speech technology, it systematically analyses all
forms of relevant parliamentary utterances. It explores and curates an exhaus-
tive but understudied multi-modal collection of primary sources of central rele-
vance to Swedish democracy: the audio recordings of the Swedish Parliament’s
debates. The project studies the framing of terrorism both as policy discourse and
enacted politics, examining semantic and emotive components of the parliamen-
tary discourse on terrorism as well as major actors and social networks involved.
It covers political responses to a range of terrorism-related issues as well as fac-
tors influencing policy-makers’ engagement, including political affiliations and
gender. SweTerror also develops an online research portal, featuring the com-
plete research material and searchable audio made readily accessible for further
exploration. Long-term, the project establishes a model for combining extraction
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
K. Arai (Ed.): IntelliSys 2021, LNNS 295, pp. 435–449, 2022.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82196-8_32