Measuring the Acceleration of the Social Construction of Time using the BOE (Boletin Oficial del Estado)

The Practice of Conceptual History, by Reinhart Koselleck, explores the idea that there is a direct relationship between technological advancements and an acceleration in the social construction of time. This paper will quantify this theory by measuring information density and information variety of narratives in a BOE (Boletín Oficial del Estado) dataset of thirty years (1988-2018). Using Quantitative Narrative Analysis, we will define a narrative unit as a triplet of Subject, Verb, Object (SVO), and we will define information density (ID) as the ratio of narrative units per words per year. Afterwards, we will quantify the different contexts of narratives to measure information variety (IV) by constructing a network of semantic closeness from trained word embeddings. This paper will present an increased IV and ID over the observation time, indicating more and more facts being reported. The results will show evidence of an acceleration of the social construction of time.