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Historical research can be enhanced by methods and resources from various disciplines, ranging from psychology to computer linguistics. With a creative and innovative perspective on ›things we think we know‹, Milan van Lange presents a computer-assisted historical investigation into the role of emotions in dealing with consequences of World War II in the Netherlands. By ›emotion mining‹ digitised sources, van Lange shows where emotions were present and how they were expressed and discussed in the political engagement with people who experienced long-term effects of the war, such as former collaborators and war criminals, the resistance, and war victims

Historical research can be enhanced by methods and resources from various disciplines, ranging from psychology to computer linguistics. With a creative and innovative perspective on »things we think we know«, Milan van Lange presents a computer-assisted historical investigation into the role of emotions in dealing with consequences of World War II in the Netherlands. By »emotion mining« digitised sources, van Lange shows where emotions were present and how they were expressed and discussed in the political engagement with people who experienced long-term effects of the war, such as former collaborators and war criminals, the resistance, and war victims.

We are proposing a method to investigate changes in historical discourse by using large bodies of text and word embedding models. As a case study, we investigate discussions in Dutch Parliament about the punishment of war criminals in the period 1945-1975. We will demonstrate how word embedding models, trained with Google's Word2Vec algorithm, can be used to trace historical developments in parliamentary vocabulary through time.