Beyond reported history : Strikes that never happened
Mariëtte van den Hoven, Antal van den Bosch, Kalliopi Zervanou · 2010
We present a study on applying text analytics methods to historical text and data to uncover aspects of event structure. First, we associate primary historical resources, newspaper articles, to a secondary resource, a database of labor conflicts in the Netherlands, detecting newspaper stories denoting labor conflicts. For the task of retrieving newspaper articles based on database record information, we construct a query model exploiting the database record fields. We consider labor conflicts as historical events referred to in sequences of newspaper article narratives, of which the climax, i.e., the strike, may or may not have occured. We analyse documents preceding a strike by considering them as a sub-narrative class of “strike threat ” articles, and we then attempt to retrieve articles referring to conflicts which were about to burst into strike, but for some reason never did: strikes that never happened.