Word Counts and Trends in the Letter Triggering Article 50

As you know I have an interest in political discourse and communications; I find it interesting to see which terms are used when and how frequently in which contexts.

I’m not sure counting words and calculating a term’s trend in a corpus or document (particularly a brief, contemporary document) tells us anything ‘new’, but it is, at least, a different or alternative way to look into a text, to, let’s say, get into it. It perhaps undresses a text, leaving words naked as quantified signals (or perhaps bricks… that could be used to build something different using the exact same components).

I’m aware I still need to do an update on my Trump Tweets data collection, but in the meanwhile, closer home perhaps, I have deposited on figshare a a CSV file listing counts and trends of 459 terms or word forms in the full text of Prime Minister Theresa May’s letter to Donald Tusk triggering Article 50 (29 March 2017).

The data shared is the result of text analysis of a document published on the www.planforbritain.gov.uk website which is is published under the Open Government Licence. The data shared here obeys the terms of that licence.

www.planforbritain.gov.uk is subject to Crown copyright protection unless otherwise indicated. Read the Crown Copyright page on the National Archives website for more information.