Abstract

In this paper, we present Pártélet, a digitized Hungarian corpus of Communist propaganda texts. Pártélet was the official journal of the governing party during the Hungarian socialism from 1956 to 1989, hence it represents the direct political agitation and propaganda of the dictatorial system in question. The paper has a dual purpose: first, to present a general review of the corpus compilation process and the basic statistical data of the corpus, and second, to demonstrate through two case studies what the dataset can be used for. We show that our corpus provides a unique opportunity for conducting research on Hungarian propaganda discourse, as well as analyzing changes of this discourse over a 35-year period of time with computer-assisted methods.