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 they 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.

Learn how to:

• Access (Federal) Hansard in different ways
• Make sense of different models which can be applied to the data
• Make the most of the tools provided by the Parliament

You will also:

• See examples of research using Hansard as data source
• Get hands-on experience exploring Hansard as text data