Reading Lab · Dossier 2

In what language did the CPA describe Iraq and itself?

None of the CPA’s 126 legal texts calls the situation an “occupation”, while 121 invoke “the laws and usages of war” (the language of occupation law). In releases and briefings, “sovereignty” rose from 11% of documents a month in 2003 to 31% in 2004.

How did the CPA name itself and the situation in its legal texts?

Number of orders, regulations and memoranda (n=126) in which each phrase appears · source: the English text · “occupation” appears in 5 texts in other senses, reviewed by hand.

The period’s vocabulary month by month: share of documents using each term

Hover for a tracker synchronised across the eight panels; click a panel or a month to see its contexts below · dotted lines are events · choose the voice in the bar above.

Contexts of the term in the documents

Method and confidence

For each month: the number of documents in which the term appears (in English or Arabic) divided by all that month’s documents (n=2043: press releases and briefings, orders, regulations, memoranda, public notices, government, regional, essential-services and daily-report documents; contracts, budget, military training and miscellany are excluded). Each panel has its own scale because the terms differ in volume; the top value is printed in its corner.

Voice: in briefings we identify the speaker from the speaker names in the transcript (MR. SENOR, GEN. KIMMITT…) and from “Q:” for journalists’ questions. Of the term occurrences in briefings: 73% are officials’ words, 11% journalists’ questions, and 16% unattributed (these count only under “All documents”). Under “Journalists’ questions” the share is divided by the number of briefings that month.

Self-naming: we searched the English text of every order, regulation and memorandum. “Occupation” appears in five texts, all in another sense (occupying public property, profession), after manual review.

Limits: term matching is automatic on extracted text and can catch another sense of a word; the Contexts tool is there so researchers can see every use themselves.

Confidence levels: “Established” — the fact is written in the document; “Likely” — a strong automatic inference; “Doubtful” — may be an OCR or extraction artefact; “Open question” — cannot be answered from the archive alone.

Limits of the archive: its sources are the University of North Texas Libraries and the Internet Archive. The absence of a document or text from it does not mean it never existed. Events on the timelines are external context, each with its source, and we name the earliest archive document that mentions them.

Citation: “Cite this” copies an academic reference with a link that keeps the current period and filters. Every chart has a table view and a CSV file.

Open questions in this dossier (9)

All questions, their status and conclusions →