KCL • CCH • Minor programme • AV1000 • Text analysis

AV1000
Fundamentals of the digital humanities
Explorations in large corpora: Tony Blair's speeches

Tony Blair

Overview

Tony Blair was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1997 to June 2007. The 10 Downing Street web site has an archive of “non-political speeches, statements, broadcasts and interviews” given by Blair while he held this office. We have collected all the speeches (but not the other material) and turned it into a set of files ready for use in Monoconc.

Looking at the Downing Street web site, it's clear that while these may be “non-political” in that they are not speeches delivered to party conventions or other political organizations, they of course refer all the time to political issues. The speech on 2 September 2005 at the Meridian Community Centre in Watford on improving parenting is not merely an expression of personal views; in it Blair speaks at length about initiatives his government is taking. These are also not casual remarks: the Downing Street web site includes the text of interviews and spontaneous remarks as well, but the collection of speeches is limited to substantial addresses planned in advance.

With this corpus, then, it is possible to investigate the language of carefully prepared speeches and think about the Blair government's way of talking about many political issues—the economy, poverty, education, universities, terrorism, and the war in Iraq, for example. We have created two versions of the corpus, one with every speech in one big file, and the other in two files for two separate periods of Blair's time as Prime Minister, making it possible to make comparisons.

The data

The data are provided in two ways:

  1. a single big file containing every speech: tb_speeches_all.txt (3.6 megabytes).
  2. two files that divide Blair's time in office into roughly equal parts: tb_speeches_1997-2002.txt and tb_speeches_2003-2007.txt.

revised November 2007