Current Research in Digital History

Jo Guldi and Benjamin Williams

Synthesis and Large-Scale Textual Corpora
A Nested Topic Model of Britain’s Debates over Landed Property in the Nineteenth Century

Volume: 1 (2018)
Published: 27 August 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.31835/crdh.2018.01

Faced with a previously-undigested body of documents, how can a scholar generalize about what semantic, ontological, and emotional relationships organize that corpus? Digital scholars today frequently have recourse to a wide and growing array of tools for indexing words, subjects, and change over time. Yet identifying interesting moments of discontinuity is not the same as understanding what categories were at stake, and indexing the subjects of document content is not the same as understanding how they fit together. To use an example from the print world: scholarly books often have indices that list important names, places, and ideas discussed therein, and the digital tools today have allowed us to create indices for collections of document for which no card catalog exists. But for the purposes of understanding a book’s organization and orientation, reading a book’s index is less instructive than reading a table of contents. Moreover, a table of contents typically reveals tension as well as organization: different parts of the book propose ideas, data or methods that contrast with each other, and ideally the tension is typically resolved through some argument by the book’s end.

This article offers a method for creating an overview through the “nesting” of topics, a model process for interpreting better how larger and smaller discourses “fit” together in the historical ontology represented by an archive. A nesting process offers a way of annotating a topic model so as to reveal patterns implicit in the topic model. As this article will show, nesting offers the promise of not merely indexing, but also generalizing about different major categories that the body of documents discusses and how they are related to each other.

Topic modeling itself is an unsupervised form of machine learning invented in the early 2000s to aggregate content from large collections of documents.¹ Since its inception, the technique been applied to an enormous array of text-focused scholarly work, from the sociological sorting of arrest records in Los Angeles to the indexing of Thomas Jefferson’s letters.² In history, topic modeling has been applied to studying urban world-views through newspapers and tracking advertisements for freed slaves, as well as categorizing the censored articles in the French Encylopédie.³ Yet the index provided by topic modeling does not, on its face, provide an aid to synthesizing some historical truth about a large body of documents, and even topic-distance measurements, while revealing similarities and likenesses in the topic model, fail to reveal the ontological and epistemological hierarchies and tensions at stake in a corpus.

In the project described in this article, topic modeling was applied to the nineteenth-century debates of Great Britain’s House of Commons and House of Lords, colloquially known as Hansard. The accuracy of Hansard’s record of any particular speech is contested (verbatim reporting was not entirely accurate until the twentieth century).⁴ Nonetheless, Hansard offers a convenient vehicle for digital study, made freely available for at least a decade now, and already the subject of several publications in political science and historical linguistics.⁵ Because of the wealth of British historical studies of the period, Hansard also offers a high standard for testing claims about the usefulness of any particular digital process; the vast literature on nineteenth-century political, social, and cultural history, which has already revealed so much about the the implicit debates and identities governing the flow of events, partially through the success of the “linguistic turn” of historical scholarship about politics in the 1990s.⁶ Stories found by digital means are often recognizable by a trained scholar, and new findings can be easily identified.

The size of the parliamentary archive—a million speeches and a quarter billion words—makes the parliamentary debates an ideal subject for digital investigation. It would be nearly impossible for a single researcher to apply close reading to parliamentary debate to understand how categories of property and ownership evolved in the course of debate, a fact that has long made property law the subject of intellectual biography rather than horizontal reading. With tools that direct the researcher to both unpacking overarching context and identifying local events, however, the possibilities for studying historical dynamics increases immensely.

The specific nesting process described in this article offers an aid to moving from indexing towards generalization, helping the scholar to identify a variety of possible categories in the text from the large-scale to the small-scale, and to make inferences about how those categories are related to each other. Nesting takes advantage of the scalar dimension of topic modeling: the fact that a 4-topic model or a 500-topic model may be made of the same discourse, and that these topics should necessarily have a hierarchical relationship with each other. The result of this process, ideally, is a more informed interpretation of the scholarly context offered by the corpus, as well as a keen sense for particular parts of the archive where abstract categories are in tension, for instance, particular parts of the corpus where political categories elide into emotional or rhetorical ones. Theorizing that the nesting might reveal an implicit structure to parliamentary discourse and ideas otherwise obscured from the topic model, a topic model was run on Hansard at four different scales: once asking the computer for four topics, once with 20, another time with 100, and finally with 500 topics.

To illuminate how the topic overview can demonstrate previously invisible connections, this article will turn to the example of Charles Stewart Parnell and Irish tenant radicalism in the 1880s. As the research presented below will show, radicals insisted on importance of “fair rent” in the 1880s, lobbying for measures related to rent control and expropriation of colonizers’ property. The very same practices used to defend these ideals—the tactics of obstruction and the language of fairness—were later deployed against Irish Home Rule within a few decades. By the 1900s, Conservatives regularly cut off Irish speakers with resort to the importance of “fair play” in parliamentary procedure.

The nesting process helps the scholar to distinguish overarching ideas about property—which remained more or less steady over the entire period—from temporary fads and events in property law. The grand overview of context, at the higher levels of abstraction, can be distinguished and compared to event, agency, and action at the lower levels of detail. Applied in detail to parliamentary debates, studying topic structure promises to reveal connections between high ideals and universal principles, on the higher levels, and rhetoric or tactics deployed as part of a debate.

Nesting as a Process for Revealing Features of Discourse Inherent at Different Scales: Ontological, Institutional, and Temporal

Nesting is comparable to other processes for talking about topic similarity, for example measuring topic distance, which are useful for understanding clusters of discourses that share overlapping language. In a t-SNE-based measurement of topic distance in Hansard, a cluster indeed emerges of related debates about fixed rents, crofters, the compensation of tenants for improvements to their land, the valuation of taxes, the valuation of fair rents, about eviction, the valuation of estates, and discussions of eviction, probably because these discourses share a common lexicon of acreage, rates, improvement, tenancy, and rent. Its next nearest relationships are to discussions of agrarian outrages in Ireland, the Metropolitan Board of Works, the Congested Districts in Ireland, and the regulation of public houses, topics suggestive of a common language of regulating public and private spaces, building infrastructure, and cultivating the economic development of the working classes.

However, the nesting process differs from these measures of topic similarity by adding information about hierarchy as measured by reading topics from different scalar perspectives. The property of having multiple scales is natural to any varied body of textual materials that represents human expression over time. Large-scale debates, in terms of the topic model of Hansard, are discourses that were prevalent across 9–35% of Hansard as a whole, either for reasons of their ideological prominence (in the case of empire), their institutional coherence (in the case of the House of Commons itself), or temporal continuity (in the case of Britain’s ongoing relationship with Ireland and India over the nineteenth century). Smaller-scale topics, ranging from 0.1%–8% of debate, represent issues that were relatively less prominent in parliamentary debate—and thus only visible at a smaller scale of modeling. We theorize that a smaller scale in terms of topic defines issues whose politics only involved a minority of MPs, for instance, setting freight rates for the railways; which involved minor branches of British government, for instance the Metropolitan Police, or that concerned parliamentary attention for a short period of time, for instance the Queen Caroline Affair. The process of comparing scales allows a scholar to contemplate the relationship of discourse to institution, ontology, and periodization.

Scalar hierarchy demonstrates the fact that different discourses bear different relationships to periodization. The 4-topic model of Hansard, working at a grand scale, divides Hansard into four major genres of debate, all of which were relatively persistent across the period as a whole: one about taxation, one about empire and war, one about extra-parliamentary government, including schools, hospitals, churches, and towns; and one about the practical matter of presenting bills and making speeches in parliament. A 500-level topic model, by contrast, subdivides the genres of parliamentary speech into discourses recognizable as linked to specific events familiar to a historian: the creation of the Metropolitan Board of Works (1855–1889), the improvements related to the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers in 185–89, and the building of the Thames Embankment from 1862.

Table 1. Four-topic Model of Hansard

Table 2. Excerpt from a 500-topic Model of Hansard

The two scales of topic analysis may also be fitted together, with the potential of better understanding hierarchical and governing relationships between large-scale concepts at the macro-level and actual events at the micro-level. The process of nesting smaller topics within larger questions raises issues of language and institution that are not answered by measures of topic proximity, for instance: were the rights of Irish tenants debated mostly under the heading of taxation, in the same language as any other debate over property in England? Or did they occur in the context of other debates about empire and warfare that stressed the status of Irishmen as colonial subjects?

A scholar-prepared nested topic model was made by modeling the debates of Hansard, 1800–1910, at 4, 20, 100, and 500 topics, which we have labeled the “trunk”, “bough”, and “branch topics.” The trunk corresponds to the most abstract version of topic-modeling, where the computer has classified debates in only four categories, which loosely correspond to the rhetoric of parliament, empire, revenue, and expenditure—wide domains of parliamentary concern at their most generic level. As the nested topic model branches out from the trunk towards the stem and leaves, it becomes more detailed, until individual topics refer not to general processes but rather to particular principles (for instance, property law), ongoing debates (for instance, fox hunting), or events (as this paper explains below).

In the first iteration, the hierarchy was created by hand, based on the repetition of keywords in the top 20 words most relevant to a topic (for instance, “pay” in the “Revenue and Expenditure” trunk and in the “Landlords, tenants, and property questions” bough), or because of seeming overlap of content (for instance, “price” in the “Customs and Corn Laws” bough). Based on a naive reading of the topic hierarchy, property appears to be most closely related to taxation rather than to questions of empire. At the level of trunk and bough topics, land appears closely related to discussions of taxation, nationhood, and Ireland, mirroring a familiar imperial discourse where revenue and political economy predominated. Three property terms (“land,” “tenant”, and “landlord”) rank within the 20 most significant terms of the tax revenue topic itself.

The nested topic model allows us to distinguish particular sub-genres of concern with land that would be less universally relevant to MP’s across the century and more particular to certain time periods, institutions, and issues. The subcategories of landholding that appear within this model are three: “taxes paid to the exchequer,” “landlords, tenants, and property questions,” and “customs and the corn laws.” Indeed, nineteenth-century historians are familiar with three very different debates about local taxation, the role of tenants and landlords in improving the agrarian economy, and free trade and the price of bread, each of which invoked a similar lexicon (“land”, “country”, “tax”, “tenant”, “landlord”) within the context of very different ideas.⁷

Table 3. “Revenue and Expenditure” (Trunk Category), with Three Subcategories of Debate⁸

Each of of the “bough” categories of land can also be traced as it separates into further “branch” subgenres that suggest how particular debates, for example about taxes, varied with respect to institutions, time, and ideology. Beneath taxes are two further specifically quantitative discourses for defining land: “local rates,” or the setting of local taxes as a function of land prices; and “the valuation of the correct price of land,” a controversial surveyor’s technique for determining taxes and/or rent prices as a reflection of geology. Here, the distinction between different discourses of land is again familiar to a specialist in the history of taxation and surveying, who can distinguish in these three subcategories of land three different periods of debating parliament’s role in calculating and improving land value: a long nineteenth-century debate over local versus national interest in the sources of taxation, and a new conversation from the 1850s about the scientific determination of tax rates through the use of valuation, which fixed rates to geology as determined by a professional surveyor.⁹

Table 4. Taxes Paid to the Exchequer (Bough Category) and Three Sub-Branch Subcategories of Debate

The bough topic, “landlords, tenants, and property questions,” in turn splits into three branch topics: “improvement and rent as regulated by parliament,” or a discussion about parliament’s duty to encourage the upward or downward tendency of rent; “hunting”, a treatment of deer parks and game laws, and “the tithe,” on the payment of land taxes to the church. Again, the debates are familiar to a historian: a seventeenth-century conversation about landlord-based improvement and the scientific economy of the agrarian estate which later became a debate over tenant-right; an eighteenth-century debate about the rights of lords and tenants to wild game from the forest, and a specifically nineteenth-century debate about the the disestablishment of the church in Ireland, which raised important questions about agricultural taxation and the ownership of church lands.¹⁰

Table 5. Landlords, Tenants, and Property Questions (Bough Category) and Three Sub-Branch Subcategories of Debate, as Assigned by Scholar

The 20-level topic “customs and the corn laws” refers to debates about the import and export of goods from Britain, as marked by a tension between land and manufacture that emerged early in the nineteenth century. Much of the writing of the economist and member of parliament David Ricardo was attached to understanding the political and economic rivalry between the landed and manufacturing interests. In an era of free trade, working-class movements associated with the Manchester School urged on the removal of the Corn Laws established at the beginning of the century to protect British farmers from fluctuation in grain prices. At the same time, Manchester’s cotton interest lobbied for other protective legislation to keep the price of cotton low.¹¹ Three subtopics found by the computer index debates relevant to these developments: “improvement and rent as debated in parliament,” “the valuation of the correct price of rent,” and “local rates.” Portions of this debate gave rise to a conversation about rural riot and the distress of rural laborers, hence the grouping together of topics about “the Corn Laws and agricultural prices” with debates over “unemployment and relief works.”

Table 6. Customs and the Corn Law (Bough Category) and Three Sub-Branch Subcategories of Debate, as Assigned by Scholar

Finally, “Customs and the Corn Laws” breaks down into three further subcategories: “The Corn laws and agricultural prices,” interfacing with a conversation about distress and prices; “unemployment and relief works,” a direct encounter with the problem of starvation and emigration; and “customs and taxes on cotton and other imports,” a discourse explicitly about free trade with respect to a variety of commodities. These categories as well are familiar to historians of empire and political economy, who will recognize in them debates about the repeal of the Corn Laws and the agricultural interest; a discussion of the role of Corn Laws in driving distress and emigration among the working classes, especially around Ireland during the Famine; and an ideology of Britain as the leading nation of Free Trade.

Some preliminary observations about these categories have to do with linkages between keyword temporality and hierarchy in the nested model. The higher in topic hierarchy a term, the more pervasive it was. Where a keyword such as “improvement” appears at multiple levels of a nested topic model, it shows how a dominant ideology continued to structure new modes of thought, for instance, early-modern ideas of “improvement” and Blackstonean “property” being worked out through Mill’s concept of the “magic of property” all the way through the land reforms of the 1880s and 1890s. Thus a nested topic model can be a tool for discerning longue durée persistence in ideology, contrasted against shorter-term revisions such as valuation or distress.

Machine-nesting subcategories within a hierarchy potentially provides an added layer of information. We used JS divergence to automatically detect hierarchical relationships between topics, with results very different from those in the hand-nested model. We attribute this difference to the relative significance to parliamentary expression of less-prevalent terms in the topic model, i.e., terms whose ranking fell below the 20 top keywords used in the scholarly nesting process.

Reviewing the machine-nested relationships thus has the potential to reveal hierarchies based less on ideologically dominant keywords than on rhetorical expression. Subcategories of “Landlords, Tenants, and Property Questions,” according to the computer, included two subtopics that suggest the kind of formal speech frequently interjected by objectors about tenant right: “Objections to a New Bill,” and “Eulogizing the Importance of Government Time” (see figure 7).

Table 7. Comparing Scholar-Nested and Machine-Nested topics for “Landlords, Tenants, and Property”

Indeed, the top debates linked to “Landlords, Tenants, and Property Question” reveal the coincidence of Irish tenant- and home-rule agitation with a strategy of parliamentary interruption. Other subtopics are suggestive of the Irish lobby’s strategies. “Reports of Evidence of Persons Interviewed by Committees,” “Correspondence with Foreign Governments,” and “Presenting Official Documents to Parliament.” These topics suggest how Irish representatives made use of parliamentary reports and their interviews with victims of rack-renting or eviction to command attention in the house. The two remaining subtopics, “Coercion Acts to Suppress Dissent in the Colonies” and “Small Farmers and Tenant Farmers,” suggest the commonplace speaking points of the Irish lobby.

The top debate associated with “Landlords, Tenants, and Property” is actually a debate about the new procedure rules introduced by Alfred Balfour as leader of the House of Commons in 1902. Landlords and tenants are nowhere mentioned in the debate. Balfour had overseen the battering-ram campaign against rent-striking Irish tenants from 1887, before executing a plan of railways and government-backed land purchase to create a peasant proprietary.¹²

The case of the “Landlords, Tenants, and Property” topic illustrates both the difficulty of using topics as shorthand for discourse: the “Landlords, Tenants, and Property” topic is clearly more complicated than simply discussions of land. But the topic is infused with both the presence of participants in the land struggle: Ireland, the Colonial Office, and Balfour himself. Present too are issues of Irish independence and economic wellbeing (“improvement”), and the objections and diversions of colonial debate that typified the tactics of the Irish representatives both during the land war of the 1880s and during the movement for Home Rule thereafter.

Thus there are aspects of debate revealed by the nested topic model that are otherwise obscured by the topic model. A naive observer might choose to believe that “Landlords, Tenants” was a dead ringer for property and be disappointed by top debates, and use the topic as an index for debates about property. The topic model would fail the scholar, returning not the most important debates about landlords and tenants, but rather a subset of debates where Irish issues, including tenancy, intersected with parliamentary procedure.

However, with the nested topics aided by computerized determination of topic hierarchy, a careful user will note the coincidence between debates about smallholders and debates about parliamentary procedure, and find room for investigation. In the top debates linked to “Landlords, Tenants” a researcher will then find copious evidence that debates over the colonies and land rights in the 1880s and 1890s coincided with a parliamentary tactic of interruption, igniting a battle for control over parliamentary procedure.

Parliamentary time became scarcer after the Reform Act of 1867, as an increasing number of MP’s depended upon having their speeches profiled in newspapers to retain the support of their voters. A larger proportion of members of parliament turned out to vote, and more members spoke than in previous decades.The Irish lobby specialized in tactics using the shortness of parliamentary time to their advantage. After the 1850s, Irish members of parliament developed what Kari Palonen has called “obstructionist tactics” to insure the hearing of Irish causes, among them tenant rights to fair rent and freedom from eviction.¹³

Conclusion

Machine-calculated nesting of hierarchical topics allows the scholar to add a layer of critical reflection to the indexing of discourses with topic models. Nesting topics at different scales opens up general questions about longue-duree versus event-related periodization of concepts. Machine-nesting corrects for scholarly bias with the actual content of speeches, where significant nodes of debate may be less intuitive than they appear at first.

Hierarchical nesting, both by scholarly assignment and by machine-calculated nesting, represents one way of trying to capitalize on the scalar and mathematical properties inherent to topic models on large-scale data collections where documents are harvested from a wide variety of speakers working on debates that changed over time. By extrapolating the mathematical properties of topics at different scales, our potential appreciation of what any given keyword is doing in a topic model is enhanced, and with it, our ability to identify and interpret important changing points in the history of concepts.

Grand comparisons of scale lend themselves to studying the interplay of context and event: to precise debates located in time that matter for the study of history. With nested topics, the scholar can track strategic rhetorical moves and other political events in the corpus, dynamic features of history that are hard to trace with topic models. The insight lent by nested topics is their power to reveal the conjunction between macrocosmic categories such as thematic context or general lexicon and microcosmic categories defined by event, agency, and rhetoric, themes that have frequently been at the heart of traditional practices of history. In this way, nesting topics allows the scholar to forge a synthesis that tacks back and forth between evidence at different scales, encompassing both the macroscopic view of the longue durée and the microscopic material of encounters between individual lives over the scale of months, years, or a decade.

Nesting topics is but one possible tool to lend precision, insight, and synthesis to the capabilities of a scholar interested in a particular theme or event in history. Yet the work of digital tool-building is far from over. In order to further understand the play between context and event, future work will be needed to create a tool that dramatizes the relationship between nested subfields and time. Further steps in the investigation of nested topics might include separating the substantive questions of debate from rhetorical figures of speech through part-of-speech tagging and stop-wording. As digital scholars learn to make better use of tools such as computer-aided nesting that extrapolate the properties of historical debates, our ability to identify complex conjunctions of rhetoric and politics will also grow.

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Notes

Appendices

• README
• Data archive
• Code archive

Authors

Jo Guldi, Department of History, Southern Methodist University, jguldi@smu.edu, 0000-0002-5085-0738; Benjamin Williams, Department of Statistical Science, Southern Methodist University, Benjamin@smu.edu, 0000-0001-8474-5066