Creating a Mentions-Lexicon: Finding References to Literary Authors in Dutch, German and British Parliamentary Debates

Which literary authors are mentioned in parliamentary debates, and how are they talked about? These and other questions were the focus of the Oldenburg research project Literary Concepts of the Juridical and Political Elites in the Netherlands in the 20th Century. As part of this research project, funded by the DFG, parliamentary debates were searched for mentions (cf. Rosengren 1987: 298) of literary authors with automated techniques as indicators for a literary frame of reference shared by politicians (Rosengren 1987: 298). The Author_Register_Creator was developed to create a json-dictionary based on Dutch, German and British parliamentary debates from the dataset ParlSpeechV2 (Rauh/Schwalbach 2020a) and an additional set containing the names of literary authors (Mentions_canon_2022_2 and Mentions:The_Western_Canon_2). A list of 100 Dutch authors (Van Deinsen et al. 2022: 31) and a list of 250 international authors (Bloom 1994: 569–578) were used. To edit the dictionary the Author_Register_Editor was developed and the Author_Register_Inspector was used to analyze the lexicon. The data used includes all speeches held in the parliaments between 20.12.1994 and 14.12.2018.