Last week Wednesday March 6th, we launched the product of our project at our first launch event: our website! Find it on http://hansard.hud.ac.uk to check it out.
We have received considerable positive response so far and would love to hear what you think too!
Contact us on hansard.hud.ac.uk, tweet us @hansardhuds or find us on Facebook and Instagram using @hansardhud.
Just a little sneak peek of the front page of our Hansard website!
Not long now until you will get to see the product of our work over the past year!
Our website has been developed so far now that we are looking to launch it the beginning of March. After March there will still be time for changes, developments and improvements, but the launch should present the largely finished product.
Would you like to be among the first to see it more of it, experience it for yourself and hear more about our motivations for it?
Come along to one of our launch events in either London or Huddersfield!
London event:
6th March 2019, 5 p.m.
Palace of Westminster
Sign up: hud.ac/e37
Huddersfield details:
13th March 2019, 11.30 a.m.
Heritage Quay, University of Huddersfield
Sign up: hud.ac/e38
This blog explains the rationale behind the website http://hansard.hud.ac.uk, which is the product of the Hansard at Huddersfield project.
This project is an AHRC-funded project undertaken at the University of Huddersfield that has produced a user-friendly web-based version of Hansard, the record of the UK parliament. The project aims to enable both professionals with an interest in the workings of government and the public to see how their concerns are addressed by politicians.
This project builds on another recent project (the SAMUELS project) which annotated the whole of the historic database of Hansard with ‘tags’ enabling users to distinguish between synonyms such as ‘Labour’ (Party) and ‘labour’ (relations) and to trace historical development of topics, despite the different vocabulary that is used at different periods.
The project has made this annotated database freely available through our website and offers a range of easy-to-use search facilities with associated visualisations, which make the rich resource of Hansard more useful to a wide range of people and more informative for non-expert users.
In order to develop a responsive and helpful tool that meets real world needs, the project team has worked closely with likely end-users from a diverse group of organisations which share a professional interest in the deliberations of parliament. These partners include political parties, pressure groups, local authorities and think tanks. While the website has already been published, improvements and debugging are still in progress. This means your suggestions are still more than welcome! Please email us or reach out to us on social media.
We are also aiming to raise awareness of the website and of language-based researching of parliamentary debates through workshops and talks between April 2019 and December 2019. Please let us know if you or your organisation is interested in us coming to do a workshop or a talk.
You can contact us at hansard@hud.ac.uk, or send a message to any of our social media pages as found on this page!
