Summary

Parliamentary proceedings reflect our history over centuries. They exist in a common format that has survived the test of time, and reflect any event of significance (through times of war and peace, of economic crisis and prosperity). With carefully curated proceedings becoming available in digital form in many countries, new research opportunities arise to analyse this data, on an unprecedented longitudinal scale, and across different nations, cultures and systems of political representation.

Focusing on the UK, Canada and The Netherlands, this project will deliver a common format for encoding parliamentary proceedings; a joint dataset covering all three jurisdictions; a workbench with a range of tools allowing for the comparative, longitudinal study of parliamentary data; and substantive case studies focusing on migration, left/right ideological polarization and parliamentary language. We hope that comparative analysis of this kind, and the tools to support it, will inform a new approach to the history of parliamentary communication and discourse, and address new research questions.

Objectives

The project aims to enable comparative parliamentary research on parliamentary discourse along many dimensions: time, country, political affiliation (on a left-right axis), gender, ‘opposition’ versus governing status and more. The project will not only demonstrate the importance of parliamentary data per se, but also the importance of that data being marked up and linked.

Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes

• UK and Canadian Hansard proceedings enriched with semantic mark up; Dutch parliamentary proceedings enriched with links to external sources.
• A toolkit allowing sophisticated analysis of all three datasets, focusing on Natural Language Processing techniques.

Case studies showing the ways in which the enhanced data can inform research.