Last week’s blog detailed the ways in which we engage with our end-users. This week we would like to explain how we aim to address some of their suggestions.

We love receiving suggestions from as many different end-users as possible. We hope that many of these suggestions will influence the final version of our Hansard interface. However, our project is finite in time and money and so we will be attempting to incorporate many, though not all, of the suggestions by the time of our launch in March 2019.

Rather than dwelling on these limitations, we like to focus on the feasibility of many of the suggestions we have received. And each of these suggestions will, once incorporated, significantly improve the number and range of questions relating to Hansard that can be easily answered.

Up to now, users have been able to search Hansard to answer a specific research question related to a particular period, MP, political party or concern. But we are aware that some users may just want to explore Hansard more generally, perhaps in order to start creating or refining the questions they want to ask. They may want to delimit the specific selection of data they want to search but using more generic identifiers than date and speaker. It is, for example, no use to search the whole of Hansard if you are specifically looking to find contributions from the Labour Party on a particular topic. Neither can an individual go looking for each Party members’ contribution individually.

One way in which we are trying to address this is by including archival information about MPs into the website, such as their gender, party affiliation and when they sat in parliament. This means users will be able to click on MP’s names in Hansard to find this information, and will allow them to search for contributions from, for example, female Conservative MPs in 1973.

Next to being able to search per party, we are looking to use archival data to establish constituency boundaries to allow searching for attitudes of MPs within particular constituencies. Paired with election results, this should make for an interesting exploration of what parties This all should help users to have a better understanding of the debates they are looking through without having to find this MP information on other websites.

Incorporating MP data will also allow for more concrete visualisations of Hansard search results. It means that for example the number of contributions per constituency can be counted too. Or what about it generating an outline of the clashes between political parties? These ideas are under examination at the moment, so no promises! But it will give you and idea of how we are thinking.

You might want to share the fascinating search results our interactive interface for Hansard will bring up in your own reports and publications. Rest assured, there will be an option to easily download the results in, hopefully, several different formats. Another feature should enable you to enrich your social media posts with our graphs and visualisations.

Perhaps you can think of other features we could incorporate. If you have ideas of how our interface might be of use to you, contact us on hansard@hud.ac.uk to inform us of your suggestions!