DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15548394
title: Chronorhetorics Corpus: Political Speeches for Temporal-Political Analysis

description: Chronorhetorics Corpus

A large-scale corpus of political speeches for analyzing temporal figures and political enforcement patterns in times of change.

Overview

This corpus was created to study Chronorhetorics - the relationship between temporal language patterns and political enforcement in political discourse. The dataset enables computational linguistic analysis of how political actors use temporal references to advance their political projects and legitimize power.

Our work explores the concept of Chronopolitics, specifically focusing on "politicized time" - time employed as a weapon of politics and a means of legitimizing political programs.

⚠️Work in Progress: This corpus is currently under active development. While we are making it available for research purposes, please be aware that additional content may be added over time, data structure changes may occur as we refine our approach, and field modifications might happen based on research needs and technical considerations. We recognize that some current technical design decisions may not be optimal and are subject to revision. Researchers using this corpus should expect potential updates and changes. We recommend checking back regularly for updates and versioning information.

Corpus Description





Sources

The corpus contains various forms of political speeches from multiple official and archival sources:

Government Sources:



US White House - Presidential remarks and speeches



Current: whitehouse.gov/remarks/

Biden Archive: bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov

Trump Archive: trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/remarks/

Obama Archive: obamawhitehouse.archives.gov

Bush Archive: georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov



Russian Presidential Speeches - Kremlin transcripts and statements (English translations)



tadadit.xyz/datasets/kremlin.ru_ru/ (base dataset)

en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts (updated through March 2025)



German Bundestag - Parliamentary debates and proceedings



Historical: GermaParl corpus (Blätte & Blessing, 2018)

Recent: bundestag.de/services/opendata



German Chancellor Speeches - Olaf Scholz addresses



bundeskanzler.de/bk-de/aktuelles/reden



Ukrainian Presidential Speeches - Volodymyr Zelenskyy addresses (English translations)



president.gov.ua/en



UK House of Commons - Parliamentary speeches and debates



parliament.uk (Hansard archives)

parser.theyworkforyou.com/hansard.html (XML dataset)




Specialized Collections:



Munich Security Conference - Annual conference speeches (1963-2024)



MSC Speeches Collection



Hitler Speeches - Adolf Hitler speeches from Max Domarus collections



Domarus, Max. Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932-1945 (Volumes 1 & 2)




Content Types



Public addresses and announcements

Parliamentary debates and proceedings

Public interviews and hearings

Holiday announcements and ceremonial speeches


Temporal Coverage



Time span: 1919 - March 2025

Languages: German (de), English (en)

Total size: Over 90% of tokens come from Bundestag and House of Commons speeches


Metadata

Each speech includes standardized metadata:



Date of speech

Speaker information (individuals and institutions)

Language code

Source institution

Speech type/context




License



This corpus is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).


By downloading and using the corpus, you agree to:


- Cite the corpus appropriately in any publications using the provided citation format

- Respect the terms of use for derivative datasets (GermaParl, etc.)

- Attribute the work when redistributing or creating derivative works

- Use the data for research, educational, and commercial purposes as permitted under CC BY 4.0


To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.


Citation

@dataset{nieser2025chronorhetorics,
  title={Chronorhetorics Corpus: Political Speeches for Temporal-Political Analysis},
  author={Nieser, Florian and Gaede, Jonathan and Schatz, David and Pietrusky, Stefan},
  year={2025},
  institution={Heidelberg Center for Digital Humanities, Heidelberg University},
  doi={10.5281/zenodo.15548394},
  url={https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15548394}
}


References

Blaette, Andreas (2017): GermaParl. Corpus of Plenary Protocols of the German Bundestag. TEI files, available at: https://github.com/PolMine/GermaParlTEI.

Divita, David. "Radical-right populism in spain and the strategy of chronopolitics." History and Theory, 62/4:3–23, 2023.

Domarus, Max. Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932-1945. Volumes 1 & 2. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers.

Esposito, Fernando and Tobias Becker. "The time of politics, the politics of time, and politiced time: An introduction to chronopolitics." Language in Society, 52:757–781, 2023.



Contributors



Dr. Florian Nieser - Heidelberg Center for Digital Humanities (HCDH), Heidelberg University

Jonathan Gaede - Heidelberg Center for Digital Humanities (HCDH), Heidelberg University

David Schatz - Heidelberg Center for Digital Humanities (HCDH), Heidelberg University

Dr. Stefan Pietrusky - Heidelberg Center for Digital Humanities (HCDH), Heidelberg University



Contact

For questions about the corpus or research, reach out to the HCDH team at Heidelberg University.

Acknowledgments

This research was conducted at the Heidelberg Center for Digital Humanities (HCDH), Heidelberg University. We thank the institutions that make their political speeches publicly available, enabling this research.

Special acknowledgments:



The GermaParl project (Blätte & Blessing, 2018) for providing comprehensive German parliamentary data

The German Bundestag's open data portal for transparency and open government data access

Tadadit.xyz / Giorgio Comai for providing the foundational Kremlin speeches dataset

Munich Security Conference for making historical speeches available

TheyWorkForYou.com for providing the comprehensive Hansard XML dataset that enabled UK parliamentary data integration

Various government archives and institutions for maintaining accessible speech collections


📋 For complete documentation and technical details, visit our GitHub repository