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AbstractThis article argues that historians have failed to grasp the profound opportunities afforded by computational analysis. Despite the abundance of machine‐readable data liberated by digitisation—alongside tools and exemplar studies—there has been no widespread embrace of text mining or revival of cliometrics. This ambivalence has arisen mainly through apathy and side‐lining of computational analysis to a specialist methodological niche. The absence of justification is damaging to the intellectual vitality of the discipline and its capacity to face the dawning age of data science.The article calls for an urgent debate about the historian and the computer. More than anything else, this requires sceptics to come forward to meet the advocates to discuss how we face the future. British political history has a proud tradition of methodological innovation and there is no better subfield in which to begin a debate that has fundamental implications for the whole discipline.

This article asks us to reconsider the impact of the issue of imperialism in electoral politics in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Using a corpus of around five million words of digitised campaign speeches from the years 1880– 1910, it examines the language of the nine General Elections held in this period through computerised textmining. This 'big data' analysis produces three conclusions, which in some cases nuance existing interpretations and in others directly challenge them. The first questions the prevailing consensus that elections in the high age of empire featured imperialism as a consistently central issue. The article argues that this interpretation relies too heavily on evidence from a minority of elections—especially the famous 'khaki' struggle of 1900—and that in the majority of campaigns in this period, imperialism was relatively unimportant as an election issue, including in the Unionist landslide of 1895. The second argument questions historians' preoccupation with the 'contested' nature of discourses of imperialism and patriotism at elections, and contends that—insofar as the empire was an important campaign issue at all—the Conservatives were considerably more likely to champion it and connect it to politically charged and emotive appeals than were their Liberal opponents. Finally, the article maintains that the languages of imperialism and patriotism have often been unhelpfully conflated by historians, and argues that they could become politically synonymous only in the very specific circumstance of a 'khaki' election. In other contests, they could diverge, as is demonstrated by a case study of the campaign of 1906 when patriotism was reclaimed by the Liberals from a domestic, rather than imperial platform.

This article investigates the impact of the 1883–5 electoral reforms on the political culture of elections and electioneering in the constituencies, using the borough of Ipswich as its focus. It argues that historians have underestimated the extent to which the Franchise and Redistribution Acts of 1884–5 transformed political cultures outside the countryside and large cities, and that the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 had a major impact on the modernisation of party organisation. Principally, however, it challenges the prevailing historical consensus that the basis of post‐reform constituency politics remained, to a large extent, local in nature, by suggesting that electioneering cultures were placed under considerable 'nationalising' influences from the early 1880s on. Rather than resisting these influences, the established Ipswich parties largely embraced them. Moreover, a general decline in corruption, and a general increase in the number of speeches reported in local newspapers from 'carpetbagger' candidates and national leaders, created a climate in which it was now more difficult for any constituency, however idiosyncratic, to insulate itself from 'national' politics.

The goals of the DiLiPaD project were to 1) enhance the existing corpora of parliamentary data from the UK (1803 to the present) and Canada (1867 to the present) to the same standards as the comparable Netherlands corpus covering 1814 to the present; 2) develop new tools for the study of this data; 3) explore research questions, both in conjunction with and following on from the enhancement of the data and the provision of these tools. Specifically the project team investigated gender and politics, focusing on the role of women in parliamentary debate, the framing of same-sex marriage and the measuring of emotion in parliamentary debates.