Big Data in the Chamber: Corpus-Assisted Studies of Parliamentary Discourse Across Time and Space
Instructors:
Anna Kryvenko
Duration: both weeks
Parliaments are pivotal institutions in democracies, shaping policies that impact citizens by deliberating critical societal issues. The debates are commonly recorded as open-access digital proceedings enriched with metadata. These records are valuable for researchers exploring political, societal, historical, cultural or communicational dynamics in fields such as linguistics, discourse analysis, political science, history, sociology, gender studies as well as for various teaching contexts. This workshop takes advantage of the interoperability and comparability of the ParlaMint corpora containing parliamentary proceedings from 26 national and 3 regional parliaments across Europe at least between 2015 and 2022, although several ParlaMint corpora include data spanning a much longer period. Available in the original languages and machine-translated to English, the corpora also feature metadata on speakers, parties and speeches, including names, gender, age, roles, party affiliation, power positions, political leanings, speech dates, topics and sentiment. This hands-on project-oriented tutorial will provide skills and methodological training to explore ParlaMint version 5.0, which can be obtained by downloading the files or by accessing the preloaded data via online platforms – primarily noSketch Engine and TEITOK. All data and tools are open access and can be used free of charge. Designed for researchers in Social Sciences and Humanities with interest in parliamentary discourse but no or little familiarity with corpus linguistic tools, this workshop will train participants to leverage extensive content, annotations and metadata via user-friendly concordancers, facilitating research on individual national parliaments, enabling transnational comparisons, and fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration. Participants with also discover CLARIN – Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure.