Geoffrey Ford: Parsing parliament: parliament's proceedings as researchers' data
Channel: NDF - National Digital Forum
Date: 2018-11-29

Wednesday November 21st, 12:00pm-12:25pm @ Rangimarie 1 - Breakout Room

This presentation draws on my experiences building and analysing a 57-million-word annotated corpus based on the official online version of the New Zealand Parliamentary Debates (or Hansard). I discuss the process of building the corpus and writing software to browse and analyse the corpus. I engage with two questions: What can researchers learn by applying software-driven approaches to the parliamentary record? What are the opportunities and challenges for researchers working with the parliamentary record? With respect to this second question, I discuss my initial work connecting this data up with other data sources, including the recently available historic Hansard volumes, and progress towards a public-facing version of the corpus and browsing software for researchers and the public.  

Geoffrey Ford , University of Canterbury, Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Arts Digital Lab