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The workshop Digital Parliamentary Data in Action 2024 (DiPaDa 2024) took place in Reykjavik, Iceland,on 28 May, co-located with The 8th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference(DHNB 2024). The workshop, along with its predecessor organised in Uppsala in 2022, supports theadvancement of research using parliamentary datasets, which present both opportunities and challengesfor interdisciplinary research and infrastructure development especially in the digital humanities andsocial sciences.

This paper presents an AI-assisted method for information extraction from historical documents using multimodal large language model (MLLM). We develop a pipeline to retrieve text and events from Swedish historical patent cards using the GPT-4o model to extend the Swedish historical patent database. Our study demonstrates how generic MLLMs can help to save time and labor cost for creating applicable data in a low-source setting, which is a common challenge for digital humanities projects leveraging the latest AI technologies. We also explore the error flagging for automated text recognition that can integrate into traditional information extraction workflow: the MLLMs’ vision capacity helps to identify documents with potential errors that require human verification. We conclude that the model generates usable yet imperfect data which speeds up data collection and reduces its cost. The flags created simultaneously in information extraction enable to evaluate the model’s performance and to allocate human resources for actual error correction through manual transcription. With the rapid development of open MLLMs recently, a promising future step is to explore local solutions for fine-tuning and application of the models.

The paper presents a method that studies similarity between patent documents to investigate what past inventions have been important. This question of assessing patent value is particularly challenging in historical contexts, where relevant metadata used for valuation such as patent citations are not available. The idea behind the method is that similarity between patent documents allows us to estimate the novelty of a patented invention (new technical vocabulary) and its impact for the subsequent inventions (vocabulary is repeated). Being both novel and impactful signals an important invention, a ”breakthrough” patent. We apply the method to analyse historical patent documents granted in Sweden between 1890 and 1929, that have been published in the Swedish Historical Patents database. The paper builds on previous work by Kelly et al. (2021), where they apply the method to study U.S. patent data. We improve the method in terms of data preparation and normalization, and use the method to examine technological advances at an aggregate level over time in Sweden. We conclude that the data preparation is an important step to be able to focus on the relevant vocabulary that regards the technological content of the patents. This measure of importance can be applied in the future to study, for example, the study of the backgrounds of the inventors with important patents.

This paper presents the Swedish National Doctoral School in Digital Humanities: Data, Culture, and Society – Critical Perspectives (DASH) that is run in 2023–2027 by Uppsala University, Umeå University, Linnaeus University, and Gothenburg University. Though Swedish universities have established PhD courses, MA programmes and training in digital humanities previously, DASH is the first encompassing educational programme in digital humanities at the doctoral level. The present paper discusses the rationale behind the DASH doctoral school, its role in the landscape of Swedish humanities infrastructures, and provides insights from the first PhD courses and seminars. The focus of DASH is to equip PhD candidates in humanities and social sciences with knowledge and skills necessary to pursue high quality, innovative and critical research in digital humanities. DASH aims to provide knowledge in relation to digital research, its methods, tools, and critical perspectives, and to build and strengthen the networks among early career scholars. DASH facilitates access and use of the resources in the national infrastructures in the humanities, but also emerges as an element in the infrastructure by providing new resources and competences.

The article presents a novel method that enables the formation of historical patent families. Patent families are useful for studying the value of inventions and identifying key technologies, as they indicate geographic diffusion and higher patenting costs. The concept of patent family has not been employed in historical contexts as historical sources generally lack information about priority rights. The article provides a definition of a historical patent family, where patent families incorporate patents with the same invention core. The method is applied and evaluated by constructing Swedish patent families in 1885-1914 with historical patent data from Finland and the United States. Moreover, the article introduces the Patent Diffusion Index (PDI), which is an indicator of historical patent families which can be used to study the sequence and pace of market entry. The article exemplifies how historical patent families open novel perspectives on patent value and technology diffusion in contrast to current indicators, such as patent fees, which usually are bound to national contexts. The method is applicable to any national patent data, and patent drawings are suggested as an effective way to form historical patent families.

This paper presents a new infrastructure and semantic portal called ParliamentSampo for studying parliamentary speeches, culture, language, and activities in Finland. For the first time, the entire time series of some million plenary speeches of the Parliament of Finland (PoF) since 1907 have been converted from text into knowledge graphs and data services in unified formats, including CSV, Parla-CLARIN, ParlaMint, and RDF Linked Open Data (LOD). The speech data have been interlinked with a semi-automatically created ontology and a knowledge graph about the activities of over 2800 Members of Parliament (MP) and other speakers in the plenary sessions of the PoF. The data was enriched by data linking to external data sources and by reasoning into a broader LOD service. Knowledge extraction techniques based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) were used for automatic semantic annotations and topical classification of the speeches. The data and data services have been used in Digital Humanities (DH) research projects and for application development, especially for developing the in-use semantic portal ParliamentSampo. The infrastructure and the portal were published on February 14th 2023 on the Web using the open CC BY 4.0 license, and quickly gathered thousands of users, including citizens, media, politicians, and researchers of politics. ParliamentSampo is a new member in the “Sampo” series of over 20 interlinked LOD services and semantic portals in Finland, based on a national Semantic Web infrastructure. Although the paper uses Finnish parliamentary data as a case study, the approach, methods, and tools presented can be adapted also to other parliamentary datasets in other countries.

The chapter examines petitions as a tool for peasant political participation in the Russian Empire’s Grand Duchy of Finland in the 1860s and 1870s. It explores how and for what kind of purposes peasants and local peasant meetings used petitions. The Finnish national representative assembly, the Diet of the Estates, was the last in Europe to include the landowning peasants as the fourth estate. When the Diet of Finland convened in 1863, after a more than 50-year hiatus, none of the estate members or electors had experience in national representative politics. The chapter examines how local meetings and electors of the Peasant Estate in the 1860s and 1870s aimed to resolve the challenges of the new situation, gain knowledge of, and conceptualize the practices of political representation, and make their voices heard in national politics. Moreover, the chapter explores to what extent the petition work involved subaltern groups of the rural communities, for instance non-landowning groups. The chapter highlights a shift in petitioning practices. In the context of emerging national representation, local petitions were increasingly framed in terms of the national political agenda, and electoral districts began to cooperate in formulating joint petitions.

This paper presents a new open infrastructure called ParliamentSampo for studying the parliamentary culture, language, and activities of politicians in Finland. For the first time, the entire time series of some million plenary speeches of the Parliament of Finland (PoF) since 1907 have been converted into data and data services in unified formats, including CSV, Parla-CLARIN, ParlaMint, and RDF Linked Open Data (LOD). The speech data have been interlinked with an ontology and a knowledge graph about the activities of the Members of Parliament (MP) and other speakers in the plenary sessions of the PoF, enriched by data linking from external data sources into a broader ontology-based LOD service. Knowledge extraction techniques based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) were used for automatic semantic annotations and topical classification of the speeches. The data and data services have been used in Digital Humanities (DH) research projects and for application development, especially for developing the in-use semantic portal ParliamentSampo. The infrastructure was published on February 14th 2023 on the Web using the open CC BY 4.0 license, and quickly gathered thousands of users.