OPTED — WP5 Inventory of parliamentary text data sources
A bird's-eye view on available parliamentary text data across Europe, plus filterable tables of ready-to-use collections of speeches and legislative texts.
Purpose of the site
The project Observatory for Political Texts in European Democracies (OPTED; Horizon 2020 Grant Agreement 951832) aims to design a European Research Infrastructure facilitating the large-scale computational analysis of political texts in Europe. Work Package 5 focuses on national and supranational parliaments — textual data on political speeches and debates as well as legislative texts produced in and by these key institutions of European democracy. One of WP5's deliverables was the Data4Parliaments workshop in the European Parliament.
Easier access to existing text-data collections and identifying the gaps in extant data availability are among the key aims. WP5 therefore assembled an inventory of available text-data sources covering parliamentary activity — primary archives and secondary collections alike — by reviewing the relevant academic literature, scoping existing linguistic infrastructures (such as CLARIN), and surveying the computational social-science community.
What's on the site
- Bird's-eye view on coverage of existing primary archives and secondary data collections — showing where additional investment in text-data collection is most needed.
- Interactive tables for filtering and jumping to available sources by research need.
- Two top-level inventories: parliamentary speeches and legislative texts.
- Per-source metadata: types of parliamentary texts, geographical coverage, and temporal coverage of ready-to-use sources.
"Ready-to-use" criteria
WP5 pays particular attention to collections labelled ready-to-use. A source qualifies if it provides:
- clearly separated raw texts (individual speeches, unique legislative bills, etc.);
- basic metadata for individual texts (dates, speaker names and parties, etc.);
- data formats easily accessible — importable with fewer than ten lines of code in common open-source environments (R, Python) offering broad text-analysis tooling.
Contributors
The OPTED WP5 team — Institute for Political Science, Centre for Social Sciences (Budapest); University of Cologne; WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
Open the inventory
Browse the WP5 inventory → — the full interactive site (originally at opted.poltextlab.com), mirrored here as a static snapshot.