Text mining of parliamentary data: Practices of Parliament

Documenting parliamentary debates can be tricky. On the one hand, a record of discussions needs to be true and authentic, and on the other hand such a record is always an interpretation – to be apprehended for future generations. As a number of historical investigations have noticed, practices of marking up parliamentary debates differs, for example between countries. Today, within digital history projects there hence exists an increased awareness of accurate curation of parliamentary data. Issues are often mundane: are there clear starting and ending points dividing up previous documentation? How to classify events in the chamber – besides actual speeches? Other issues are of a more philosophical nature: what kinds of speech tags will be needed in the future? How can we work towards a uniformity of mark-up practices that enables comparative research? The workshop brings together a group of scholars and practitioners with different experiences of documenting parliamentary debates in four European countries: Sweden, the Czech Republic, Poland and Finland. The workshop includes five short presentations as well as a panel discussion.

Ann Larsson, Riksdagen: ”Contemporary Documentation of Debates in the Swedish Riksdag"

Barbora Hladkas, Charles University: “Czech Parliamentary Data in a Corpus”

Maciej Ogrodniczuk, Polish Academy of Science: “Processing historical Polish parliamentary data: 1919–1989”

Matti La Mela, Uppsala University: “Finnish parliamentary data (1907-): From research with diverse datasets to structured and linked data in the Semantic Parliament project”

Fredrik Norén & Väinö Yrjänäinen, Umeå & Uppsala Universiyu: ”Marking up the Swedish parliament in collaboration between humanities and data science”

Moderator: Pelle Snickars, Umeå University