Please join us for a seminar about parliamentary data and search interfaces! This seminar includes two presentations about ongoing work to develop interfaces to explore historical parliamentary debates for scholarly purposes.
The Hansard Viewer app offers an array of data-mining and statistical tools to explore the nature and evolution of language change in a political institution, the Parliament of Great Britain, 1806-1911. Citizens and scholars using our toolset can navigate from an overview showing change over time. They can inspect how different candidates talk about the same issue. The can also compare the context of how particular words were used in different periods. For each view, the user is offered a variety of different statistical and machine-learning tools that allow the "white box" comparison of how each computational model produces a different view on language use.
App: https://shinyviz.smu.edu/shiny/public/hansard-shiny
Open-Source Code: https://github.com/stephbuon/hansard-shiny
Presenter: Steph Buongiorno (Southern Methodist University)
Parliamentary debates can be approached as an analytical nexus in which discourses and concepts moving between different sites of discourse have met at the same time and space. Through them conceptual historians, for example, can analyse both general trends in human conceptualizations quantitatively and uses of concepts by individuals in particular political struggles qualitatively. The prototype of People & Parliament facilitates the use of text-mining tools to comparative conceptual history, providing results and visualisations of relative term frequencies, common ngrams and word embeddings. Currently the database includes plenary parliamentary debates from Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. We expect to yet add Finland and Ireland, possibly also some Belgian data. People & Parliament provides new perspectives on the history of representative democracy, giving rise to questions that can then be investigated in more conventional historical analysis. Public launch of the interface is planned for 2024.
Presenters: Pasi Ihalainen (University of Jyväskylä) & Berit Janssen (Universiteit Utrecht)
For Zoom link, please register using the form below.