Abstract
This paper proposes a method for estimating the abstractness of Dutch historical parliamentary speeches. The degree to which language is abstract or concrete has gained significant attention in the field of cognitive science and linguistics. The paper uses proposed computational approaches to abstractness in these fields to model and explore variation in historical parliamentary data in the context of a larger project on technocratic rhetoric. By first scoring individual terms based on the vector averaging of an annotated set of abstract and concrete terms the abstractness of speech paragraphs is estimated. The paper shows that this information captures differences in rhetorical style that remain difficult to identify with established text mining methods. Abstractness sheds light not only on what is said in parliament, but how it is said, hereby bridging semantic and stylistic analysis in digital history.
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