Parliamentary bodies around the world have been publishing transcriptions of their proceedings for decades or even centuries. These transcriptions enable public scrutiny and transparency of the actions and speech of legislative bodies and elected representatives. Because of their documentation of legislative action and speech, their relatively consistent format, and their coverages of long periods of time they are potentially useful for policy researchers, media and communication scholars, political scientists, linguists, sociologists, historians, and many others.
This workshop aims to provide a starting point for working with these transcribed proceedings, including evaluating how it might (and might not!) be useful for your research, how to get started for different kinds of projects, and cautionary notes on potential limitations. We will be using a suite of computational text analysis approaches, with no prior coding experience necessary.
We will include an overview of different proceedings around the world, the variety of different access mechanisms, pre-collected datasets, and different ways you can work with Hansards. Guest presenters from different fields will showcase their research. In the second half of the workshop we will run an interactive session on working with the proceedings of the Australian Federal Parliament.
About the organisers:
The Computational Social Science Lab at the University of Sydney is a research facility that develops interdisciplinary collaborations at the intersection between social science and data science to expand research capabilities and support the next generation of HDR students.
We are delighted to host our colleagues from the Language and Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA) who will be leading this workshop:
Dr. Sam Hames is a research fellow in computational humanities with UQ's School of Languages and Cultures and also works on the Language Data Commons of Australia and the Australian Text Analytics Platform. Sam's PhD was on machine learning for medical imaging analysis, and he has an extensive background as a data-focused software developer supporting social media and web researchers. His primary research focus is to understand how computation can enable qualitative and interpretive inquiry across the humanities and social sciences.
Simon Musgrave is Training and Communication Lead for the Language Data Commons of Australia and an Adjunct Research Fellow in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University. Starting as a syntactician specialising in Austronesian languages, his research interests extended to cover areas including language endangerment, communication in medical settings and the use of technology for linguistic research. This last interest, through work on the Australian National Corpus project, led to work in the digital humanities and to his current work in research infrastructure for the humanities.
About LDaCA:
The Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA) is making nationally significant language data available for academic and non-academic use and providing a model for ensuring continued access with appropriate community control. Australia is a massively multilingual country, in one of the world’s most linguistically diverse regions. Significant collections of this intangible cultural heritage have been amassed, including collections of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages, Australian Englishes, and regional languages of the Pacific, as well as collections important for cyber-security and for emergency communication. LDaCA is integrating this existing work into a national research infrastructure while also securing at-risk collections and improving access to under-utilised collections. LDaCA is thus ensuring that these invaluable resources will be available for analysis and reuse in the future, and that they will be managed in a culturally, ethically and legally appropriate manner guided by FAIR and CARE principles.
