This document summarizes preliminary findings from research on British Euroscepticism using the UK Web Archive. It describes using keyword searches to explore terms related to Euroscepticism and finds over 300 returns for "Eurosceptic" in 0.5% of the archived domain. It also discusses qualitative research on the emergence of Eurosceptic websites and groups. Quantitative analysis is shown through graphs of search returns by year and the potential to filter results by location. While the archive provides a unique source, the researcher notes challenges around false returns and accessing the full dataset.

1. Web Archives: A New Class of Primary
Source for Historians?
IHR Digital History Seminar
IHR Archives and Society Seminar
11 June 2013
AADDA and Euroscepticism - Preliminary Findings
Richard Deswarte
School of History, UEA

2. AADDA and Euroscepticism - Preliminary Findings
• Intro to 'Exploring and Uncovering British
Eurosceptism in the Dark Archive‘
• Keyword searching
• Qualitative research
• Quantitative research
• Preliminary thoughts

3. AADDA and Euroscepticism - Preliminary Findings
Keyword searching – Ngram style
• Eurosceptic, Euroscepticism, UKIP, EU, Referendum
Party
• Currently only searching 0.5% of domain
• Limited results – Eurosceptic 312 returns
• Ordering of results – currently host name
• Strange returns – Yorkshire Post sports pages,
Morning Advertiser
• Results/Filters – crawl year, hosts, suffixes, postcode,
exclusions

6. AADDA and Euroscepticism - Preliminary Findings
Qualitative research
• Needle in haystack
• Yes but … serendipity
• Useful research queries- i.e. emergence/existence of
websites for Referendum Party or UKIP
• Crosslinks to other sites
• Complimentary tool to IA WayBackMachine
• Sentiment analysis tool

7. Sentiment Analysis
Morning Advertiser
Forum postings
14 Feb 2007
IA WayBackMachine
Neutral (14)
Very Positive (10)
Very Negative (5)
Mildly positive (3)
Positive (1)

8. AADDA and Euroscepticism - Preliminary Findings
Quantitative research
• False returns – Yorkshire Post; Morning
Advertiser; UKIP software
• ‘Clean data’
• Postcode filtering
• Graphical visualisations

9. Postcode analysis/filter

10. 0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1400
Year 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
Euroscepticism
Eurosceptic
UKIP
EU (x100)
Referendum Party
Keyword search returns 1996-2010

11. AADDA and Euroscepticism - Preliminary Findings
Preliminary Thoughts
• Tools
• Exporting results
• Access to full data
• ‘False returns’ & ‘clean data’
• A unique but problematic primary source
(anything & everything almost)

12. Thank you. Comments and questions welcome.
Richard Deswarte
School of History
UEA
r.deswarte@uea.ac.uk