This repo provides the data to make a section-by-section comparison between different versions of the German Grundgesetz ("basic law"). It was used to generate the article "Wie sich das Grundgesetz in 70 Jahren verändert hat" at Sueddeutsche Zeitung, ceberating the Grundgesetz's 70th anniversary in 2019.
Get the data for the two versions from the grundgesetz-dev repo, then use the Markdown version below, after that run
analyze_text.R.
Can be accessed via the grundgesetz-dev repo, which aims to document all changes to the original text in a version control system.
Plus: they provide multiple output formats, like txt and markdown (as used below).
You simple use the Command line tool wdiff to compare the first GG version to the current one. To make it easier for the tool, you could add the Artikel by hand, that were added between the two versions.
wdiff -i gg_1949_added.txt gg_2019.txt > wdiff_49_12_complete.txt
As an alternative you could use the very good Diff Match Patch Implementation by Neil Fraser and parse the result.
Then you could use the parse_text_wdiff.R skript to generate a dataframe that can then be used with the analyze_text.R skript to calculate the changes.
Caution: As I switched to the markdown version later in the project, I didn't maintain the wdiff-script. It runs, but not perfectly, some parts of the change-extraction still fail.
For using the parse_text_markdown.R script you'll need the two version for comparison already downloaded. The script takes the two versions of every section in the Grundgesetz and compares them with a wdiff. This results in the best comparison, I could find.
The script returns a dataframe d_complete which can be saved as parsed_gg.RData and processed with analyze_text.R.
No matter which approach you choose before - the script analyze_text.R should run fine in both cases. It calculates the shares of the text that was added and removed (which is marked by wdiff as {+ +} and [- -]) as char_added, char_removed and char_unchanged. And it already plots some ggplots.
Benedict Witzenberger - Initial work, programming
Thanks to Benjamin Heisig for his help with the Grundgesetz data.
This project is licensed under the MIT License, see LICENSE