Parliament's Debates about Infrastructure: An Exercise in Using Dynamic Topic Models to Synthesize Historical Change

Abstract

Can "distant reading" and digital tools enhance the history of technology by revealing hitherto undetected patterns in the record? Using the parliamentary debates of Britain in the nineteenth century, this essay revisits the history of infrastructure in the British empire, asking how tools compare with secondary sources. The author applies topic modeling and dynamic topic modeling to synthesize the historical record, and finds that the results largely match the known turning points, key players, and technologies in the history of British infrastructure. In several cases, however, digital investigation draws the researcher to new results. The domains where digital tools unveil new patterns include: the improvement of the River Shannon, the alignment of political parties with particular technologies, and the chronology of building public spaces in Britain's imperial capitals. The experiment documented here validates topic models as a source for periodizing technology over time.