How can historians and data scientists work together to understand and support democracy? How should we combine knowledge of parliamentary history and digital humanities to apply computational methods to large datasets? And how does the meaning of ideas, themes, and concepts change when they travel through time and across different text genres?
Text Mining Parliamentary Democracy is the declaration title of an envisioned research program and network that was established in 2020.
As a first initiative, the founding group arranges Text Mining Parliamentary Data Seminar – an academic series that presents interdisciplinary events and workshops with international scholars working on various aspects related to digitized parliamentary records. Through the seminar series, the network of scholars and stakeholders interested in parliamentary data has grown.
November 18, 2021: “Making Democratic Debates a Tool for Citizens” Speakers: James Vernon (University of California, Berkeley), David Ernst (Liquid Democracy Technologies), Elisa Lironi (European Citizen Action Service), Paula Berman (RadicalxChange)
October 14, 2021: “What is Really Going on?” Speakers: Tim Hitchcock (University of Sussex), Josephine Hoegaerts (Helsinki University), Kaspar Beelen (Turing Institute), Maria Coll Ardanuy (Turing Institute)
September 2, 2021: “Comparing Parliaments, Novels, and Newspapers” Speakers: Ruth Ahnert (Queen Mary University of London), Daniel Wilson (The Alan Turing Institute), Mark Algee-Hewitt (Stanford University), Lesley Jefferies (University of Huddersfield), Brian Walker (University of Huddersfield), Ludovic Rheault (University of Toronto)
June 14, 2021: “Comparing National Parliament” Speakers: Pasi Ihalainen (University of Jyväskylä), Hugo Bonin (Queen Mary University of London), Jani Marjanen (University of Helsinki) Jussi Kurunmäki (Södertörns högskola)
March 18, 2021: “Practices of Parliament” Speakers: Ann Larsson (The Riksdag Administration), Barbora Hladkas (Charles University), Maciej Ogrodniczuk (Polish Academy of Science), Matti La Mela (Uppsala University/University of Helsinki), Fredrik Norén (Umeå University), Väinö Yrjänäinen (Uppsala University)
November 5, 2020: “Parliamentary Records” Speakers: Eero Hyvönen (Aalto University), Jouni Tuominen (University of Helsinki), Kimmo Elo (University of Turku), Luke Blaxill (Cambridge University), Kaspar Beelen (Turing Institute)
August 26, 2020: “Text mining parliamentary data” Speakers: Pasi Ihalainen (University of Jyväskylä), Paul Nulty (University College Dublin)
Background
The parliament has the power to transform society’s future. Its records constitute a democratic resource for our present-day that, in turn, can be used by researchers to remodel our understanding of the past. During the last decade, records of different national parliaments have been mass digitized and made publicly available to varying degrees.
As more parliamentary material gets digitized, increased scholarly attention has been directed towards this material as a rich source to study politics and political culture. The scholarly advantage is obvious: parliamentary debates, motions, propositions, governmental reports etcetera are nearly always openly available for democratic reasons. The parliamentary corpora offered within the European CLARIN infrastructure, for example, gives access to 26 datasets in different languages containing hundreds of gigabytes.
Text Mining Parliamentary Democracy deals with hands-on questions related to digitization and curation of parliamentary data: How do those who record debates deal with the complex inter-textuality (as it were) of what is happening on the floor of a chamber? 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 markup practices that enables comparative research? How to proceed beyond nation-state-centered parliamentary history?
