Abstract:

For many scholars who are not themselves historians of political thought, the major use of official records is as a benchmark for studying other kinds of development. Official records of modern political bodies are widely available in digitized form and provide one of the primary sources with which digital historians have trained their methods. This article applies the process of "reducing" textual expressions to regular form to investigate how British members of Parliament talked about empire in extremely general terms: which places did they mention, how much, and in what context. Reducing parliamentary speech to regular occurrences makes it possible to quantitatively generalize about regular and predictable structures—for example, the Eurocentric bias of Parliament and Parliament's bias toward portion of the empire under long command, with certain notable exceptions. The technique lends itself to a wide variety of other scholarly contexts.

摘要：

对于许多本身不是政治思想史学家的学者来说，官方记录的主要用途是作为研究其他类型发展的基准。现代政治机构的官方记录以数字化形式广泛存在，是数字历史学家训练其方法的主要来源之一。本文应用将文本表达“简化”为正则形式的过程来调查英国议会成员如何以极其笼统的方式谈论帝国：他们提到了哪些地方、提到了多少以及在什么背景下。将议会演讲减少到定期发生，可以定量概括定期和可预测的结构——例如，议会和议会的以​​欧洲为中心的偏见 偏向于长期指挥下的帝国部分，但有一些明显的例外。该技术适用于各种其他学术背景。