Vehemence and Victims: Emotion Mining Historical Parliamentary Debates on War Victims in the Netherlands

This paper analyses digitized historical parliamentary proceedings on post-war welfare legislation aimed at alleviating the suffering of victims of the German occupation of the Netherlands. The history of this legislation has been described and analysed extensively in Dutch historiography. The political discussions and welfare policies it encompassed have become emblematic for a perceived ’emotional history’ of the post-war Netherlands. We take established views on these discussions, and their emotional nature, as a starting point for a distant reading exercise using (external) lexiconbased emotion mining. We show that the received wisdom concerning emotionality in post-war parliamentary discussions cannot be replicated using emotion mining techniques and discuss the consequences of this finding.