Description:

DECIDON aims to analyze the mechanisms of public agenda-setting during the French Third Republic (1870-1940) by examining the complex interactions between parliamentarians, press, and intermediary bodies that shaped democratic decision-making processes. The project seeks to understand how social issues emerged, circulated, and gained traction on the political stage through computational analysis of vast digitized historical corpora, including parliamentary debates from the Journal Officiel, press archives from Gallica, and specialized publications. By leveraging semantic technologies and knowledge graphs, DECIDON will model the prosopographical data of nearly 5,000 parliamentarians (deputies and senators), their political networks, institutional affiliations, and temporal dynamics across seven decades of French democratic life.

The ontological framework developed in OntoME will serve as the foundation for structuring this rich historical dataset according to CIDOC-CRM and SDHSS standards, enabling the creation of interoperable Linked Open Data that supports both computational analysis and traditional historical methodology. This semantic modeling will facilitate the identification of patterns in agenda-setting processes, the reconstruction of political networks, and the analysis of media-parliament interactions, ultimately contributing to our understanding of how democratic institutions functioned during a pivotal period in French political history when parliamentary autonomy and press influence reached unprecedented levels.