Hansard at Huddersfield launch events in London and Huddersfield

The Hansard at Huddersfield project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/R007136/1), has been working for a year to produce a new type of interface for Hansard, the official record of parliamentary debate. This website aims to answer questions that the public and professional end-users (such as journalists, historians, teachers, lobbyists) may wish to ask. Here are some examples:

• When were the Lords most busy debating ‘Catholics’?
• How did MPs use the word ‘austerity’ in the postwar period and did it differ when it came back in the 1970s and 1980s?
• Have parliamentarians discussed poverty or wealth most since 1803? Have they discussed the poor or the rich most?
• What was the peak year for the use of ‘New Labour’ in parliamentary debate?

These searches and others are supported by attractive visualisations of the results which can be downloaded for application in the end-users’ own work. Principal Investigator, Professor Lesley Jeffries, says “Our aim has been to make the rich resource of Hansard more appealing to the casual user, but also more readily searchable by professionals wanting to see patterns of behaviour in parliament, through patterns of language use. We look forward to seeing how it is used and by whom.” Users of the site are encouraged to give the team feedback (hansard@hud.ac.uk) as the site will be developed further over the coming months.

The website will be launched in the Palace of Westminster at 5 p.m. on March 6^th (register here to attend: http://hud.ac/e37), followed by a drinks reception, and in Huddersfield on 13^th March 2019 in Heritage Quay, at the University of Huddersfield, starting at 11.30 a.m. and including lunch. Please register on http://hud.ac/e38.

Notes for Editors:

• For more information, please contact Professor Lesley Jeffries:
  Email: l.jeffries@hud.ac.uk Mobile: 07717 899210
• Journalists particularly welcome to attend the event.
• The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)funds world-class, independent researchers in a wide range of subjects: history, archaeology, digital content, philosophy, languages, design, heritage, area studies, the creative and performing arts, and much more. This financial year the AHRC will spend approximately £98 million to fund research and postgraduate training, in collaboration with a number of partners. The quality and range of research supported by this investment of public funds not only provides social and cultural benefits and contributes to the economic success of the UK but also to the culture and welfare of societies around the globe. Visit them at: ahrc.ukri.org, on Twitter at @ahrcpress, on Facebook at Arts and Humanities Research Council, or Instagram at @ahrcpress.

One example of interactive visualisations:

>> Select 1-4 words for a frequency distribution

>> Select a time period for a list of contributions of both search terms in a certain period

>> Select one contribution for further analysis of this one contribution

Would you like to know what our website is going to look like? Because we are still working on improving the website, we cannot reveal the website itself yet. We can, however, give you a little flavour of what it will look like.

Below are five examples of the website’s search functions and associated visualisations to give you a flavour of what you can expect from the website. They are clickable for enlargement.

We aim to produce a resource that is as maximally beneficial for all our end-users as possible. We wish we could incorporate all the suggestions we have received so far! Many are very important and relevant ideas, and would benefit many of us users of Hansard.

Unfortunately, we have limited time and money. Our grant runs out in March 2019, and we plan to have finished whatever we can produce by then. That means we have had to filter the suggestions for feasibility. We are happy to announce that we have been able to get an extensive list of feasible suggestions. Our excitement for getting on with making them happen is fueled by knowing that many of our current end-users are happy with all we are able to promise them at this stage.

All of our current end-users have received an email with our list. If you have not, please contact us at hansard@hud.ac.uk. If you are not an end-user yet, but are interested in getting involved, or would just like to know what we are planning to do, then do please get in touch!

Our team recently organised two end-user meetings with representatives of organisations interested our project’s product. One of these meetings took place on the 11th July at the University of Huddersfield, and for the other one the team travelled to London to speak to interested organisations based in our capital. After sharing the rationale for and progress of the project so far, the end-users present were invited to provide feedback and ideas for the further development of our project. The meetings confirmed a need and overwhelming interest for the project, and proved valuable for its progress.

At the moment we are combing through all the feedback we received from the representatives of 8 organisations (incl. different departments within parliament) who attended our meetings. We have noticed that our end-users see a clear need for being able to compare debate contributions of the different political parties, and different MPs. They would also love to be able to find different MP’s main concerns in general, and MPs (and party’s) main interests within debates. During the end-user meetings we identified linguistic methodology that the Hansard at Huddersfield team would use to address such queries, and together with our end-users we looked at ways in which we could make those methods more accessible for non-linguist end-users. We also showed a demo of clear visualisations of the Hansard dataset that we aim to put on our final website. Think interactive word clouds, graphs, pie charts and detailed concordances. In the light of accessibility of the Hansard data, all of these were received by our end-users with open arms.

Using all the feedback we received, we are working on producing a list of website features that we aim to be working on in the coming months. This list will be circulated among our end-users shortly. If you are not an end-user yet, and would like to be, or would just like to receive this list too, please contact us at hansard@hud.ac.uk.

We will likely be holding a second round of end-user meetings towards the end of 2018 too. During these meetings, we would like to see how our end-users would use the resource we will have produced by that time, and receive further feedback and ideas to create the best possible resource within our time and means. Watch this space or our social media accounts for details to come in due course!

An important part of our project is to collaborate with potential end-users of our Hansard resource. We do not want to dictate which aspects of the Hansard material will be most readily available through our website, but rather we wish to develop a responsive and helpful tool in collaboration with them.

There are two ways to get involved:
1. Attend our end-user meetings
2. Trial our resource

Our first end-user meetings will be held on the 11th of July in Huddersfield, and the 18th of July in London. These meetings will be the same, but take place in different places for the convenience of our end-users. We will present the resource as it stands then, and look forward to brainstorming and discussing with our end-users what features they would like to see the Hansard at Huddersfield resource have.

The trialing of our resource will happen later in the year, after some of the suggestions at the end-user meetings have been implemented. No need to come to a meeting for that – the test version to trial will be sent to you via email.

Interested in getting involved in the end-user meetings? Or perhaps in trialing our resource? Or both? Looking for more information? Want the exact address of the end-user meetings? Contact us at hansard@hud.ac.uk!