Z-score filtered bursty baby names. The Meertens Institute collects the popularity of baby names. I visualized the most ‘peaky’ or ‘bursty’ women’s names, showing how popular culture impacts naming.
The “Algemene Politieke Beschouwingen” traditionally form the highlight of the Dutch parliamentary year. The government presents its budget to the House and politicians have the opportunity to question, attack, or praise the plans. Visualizing the debates is easier said than done. Procedure, rhetoric, and sudden developments (such as the publication of new information that embarrasses the government) make them highly unpredictable. This is my attempt to visualize part of the APB; the ‘first term’ in which political leaders have the opportunity to speak.
The meaning of a concept is defined in relation to its neigbors. That is how linguists and conceptual historians understand semantics nowadays. In my dissertation project I make extensive use of ‘semantic similarity’ as captured in Word2Vec models. By iterating over neighbors to neighbors to neighbors, I construct networks of words that reveal important terms in semantic fields around a target word. As an example, this is the network generated for
I recently found the work of Stefanie Posavec, who visualizes novels by plotting sentences as lines, turning rightward after every sentence. I did the same for parliamentary debates, visualizing every speech as a line colored by party and turning 90 degrees.
The Dutch Public Broadcaster (NOS) is my main source of news. What did their website talk about in 2023? Using BERTopic I identified themes and plotted their frequency over time, as well as the ‘novelty’ of the topic distribution
‘Crisis’-conjunctions in Dutch newspapers over time. Taking words ending with ‘crisis’ from the (KB Ngram Collection)[https://lab.kb.nl/dataset/newspaper-ngram-collection] yields a cross-section of crisis-talk over the years. I categorized the words based on their meaning and counted the number of different conjuctions per year (productivity).
The most distinctive terms in party manifestos for the 2023 elections.
The results of elections are usually displayed on maps. These maps show geographic space, with results per town or province. Like any data visualization, these maps are limited. They most often color spatial units by the winning party. Maps turn blue if the liberals win, red if socialists (hypothetically) do or brown if the middle classes have fallen for the fascists again. With the volatile electorates of today, these maps often give the impression of landmark shifts and fundamental breaks with the past.
Thinking about events in terms of ‘affairs’ is quite common in politics and the public sphere. At the same time, our propensity for calling things ‘affairs’ has changed. Especially in the last quarter of the twentieth-century, affairs have proliferated, something I discuss in my dissertation as the ‘moralization’ of politics. In this visualization, I list all the words that end with ‘-affaire’ mentioned in Dutch postwar Lower House debates in order of appearance.