PIDIMEHS: Pillarization and depillarization tested in digitized media historical sources

PIDIMEHS is a pilot study in an interdisciplinary project combining historical and political communication research with data mining and visualization techniques to analyse and present the relation of politics and media in a broad period of Dutch history (1910-2000). The pilot research focuses on analysing and interactively visualizing big data sets based on historical media sources and related material connected to political culture. The long-term historical connections between the content of newspapers and magazines on the one hand and and sources of political culture (party journals, yearbooks, Proceedings of Parliament) on the other, will be reconstructed to test the classic thesis of political scientist A. Lijphart (1968) concerning the pillarisation process in Dutch political history. This research uses digital search instruments to reconstruct connections between politics and media on the level of content and the personnel network. It also tries to develop a first framework for understanding the process of depillarisation after 1970. In experimenting with searching, connecting and visualizing digital media and political sources the project is an interdisciplinary effort of political communication studies, historical science and computational science. The project is a cooperation of UVA (Media Studies and Informatics Institute), University of Groningen (Documentation Centre Dutch Political Parties, DCDPP) and Netherlands eScience Center.