HERITAGE LEGAL DISCOURSE TRENDS: A SEMIAUTOMATIC ANALYSIS FOR SUPPORTING CRITICAL READING
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 16/11/2020

In recent years, the regional laws on cultural heritage in Spain have experienced considerable changes, repealing and / or modifying previous laws to adapt them, supposedly, with current demands. According with these updates, some authors have made critical analysis of the changes arisen from the comparison between the previous cultural heritage laws and the new ones. Specifically, we have carried out this comparative analysis in Galicia, detecting some trends of change in the ontological and the spatial treatment, as well as in the political and economic dimensions of heritage, which could give us some insights about certain strengthening of a cultural heritage management model more in line with a context of neoliberal governance. Based on this critical analysis, this paper presents a semiautomatic analysis of the discourse presented in the legal texts on cultural heritage in Galicia (the old one from 1985 repealed and the current law from 2016), with the aim of offering a complementary vision that allows us to detect signs of the change trends previously outlined.
Thus, a methodology has been designed for the annotation of both legislative texts. This annotation was based on a selection of linguistic information considered relevant to the exemplification of the detected trends. Subsequently, each one of these tendencies has been contrasted using natural language processing algorithms, according to the frequency of occurrence of annotated terms and their underlying concepts, the discursive structure extracted automatically (what level of importance receives a term annotated within each legislative text), and according to its semantic polarity (if certain discourse parts have a greater component of positive or negative terms). The results obtained show the value of these semiautomatic analysis methodologies in order to complement and sustain a critical reading of the heritage discourse reflected in the legal texts.


Author(s): Martin-Rodilla, Patricia (Institute of Heritage Sciences) - Barreiro, David (Institute of Heritage Sciences)