We have run a research to indentify the core characteristics outlined in national athems
learn more
What do
national anthems
hide?
WHAT
did we do
WHY
did we do it
HOW
did we do it
we have completed a comprehensive analysis of textual data extracted from national anthems
national anthems can reveal a lot of information about life in the exact country
to process the data we used nontrivial digital methods
The hypotheses stated
Get familiar with our initial assumptions regarding the data provided in texts
  • 1
    Does religion affect the texts?
    The connection between the most popular confession and attitude to God in each country.
  • 2
    Does politics matter?
    The interrelation between the country's current political regime and the sentiment of its anthem
  • 3
    Where did the sentiment come from?
    The correlation between the country's historical background and the overall sentiment of the anthem
  • 4
    How are the people described?
    Accuracy of the characteristics given the nation via the most frequent word in the anthem
Research methodology
Corpus
We collected a linguistic corpus of 205 texts of the official versions of national anthems using AntConc
Processing of textual data
To identify the keywords we made word clouds for each text. The most frequent words were the biggest. Then we filtered KWIC (keywords in context) via LancsBox
Dataset
We gathered the data about the religion, politics, reference to God and the national portrayal (where given)
Visualization
Lastly, we created interactive maps using the previously processed information from the dataset. For this task, we used Tableau Desktop
Take a look at our fully interactive maps!
Results
Which of our assumptions were confirmed:
  • 1
    Religion affects the texts
    The mention of God in the text of the anthem depends on the most popular religion in the country. The mention of God in most cases is common for the whole geographic region, not just for a specific country.
  • 2
    Historical background
    Countries faced events in history usually reflect this in the general sentiment of the text of the national anthem.
  • 3
    God save the Queen
    Most monarchies mention their emperor in the national anthem. It happens more often than in texts of countries where another political regime is set.
  • 4
    Common past remains common
    In countries located in a region for which a common history is similar for all countries, people are characterized by the same set of words.
Let's become acquainted
In case you wonder who we are
  • Evgenia Korchits
    Visualization developer,
    ITMO University
  • Aleksandra Pugaeva
    Text miner,
    ITMO University
  • Arezoo Adibeik
    PhD in Linguistics,
    Lancaster University
  • Antonina Puchkovskaya
    PhD in Cultural studies,
    head of DH Center
Contact us:
eugenia.k.korczyc@gmail.com
aaapavlenkoaaa@gmail.com
Digital Humanities Centre
ITMO University,
9 Lomonosova str,
Saint Petersburg, Russia


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