The Hansard at Huddersfield website helps you engage more effectively with the patterns and trends of parliamentary debates contained in Hansard, the official record of U.K. parliament, without the need for expert software. You can find it at hansard.hud.ac.uk.
This site contains nearly every contribution to parliamentary debate from both Houses of U.K. Parliament between 1803 and February 2021, and allows for interactive engagement with the complex linguistic, historic and thematic patterns in the language of Hansard through simple searches.
The Hansard at Huddersfield project started in March 2018 at the University of Huddersfield. The first version of their Hansard web application was launched on 11th March 2019. Since then, the site has undergone various updates, most notably to add the 2005-2019 Hansard dataset to the site in December 2019. The site was updated until February 2021 in March 2021.
The project’s aim is to make the rich resource of Hansard more useful to a wide range of people and more informative for non-expert users. By adapting the complex search tools linguists use to study large databases like Hansard, the project aims to provide new ways of scrutinising and visualising patterns in Hansard data.
The rationale behind this was two-fold:
- The Hansard data is so rich that more researchers ought to use it. Hansard resources to date do not always provide the search tools needed for systematic, in-depth study of debates, individual contributions and overarching patterns in Hansard.
- Researchers into Hansard might gain helpful insight from the software linguists use to study patterns in large datasets. This so-called ‘corpus linguistic’ software is, however, meaningless to those without the relevant linguistic or statistical expertise to interpret its search results.
To provide more intuitive but similarly powerful search tools to non-linguists, the Hansard at Huddersfield site boasts simplified corpus linguistic search tools, made more accessible by combining them with interactive visualisations.
In order to develop a responsive and helpful tool that meets real-world needs, the project team worked closely with likely end-users from a diverse group of organisations which share a professional interest in the deliberations of parliament. These end-users include researchers from political parties, pressure groups, local authorities and think tanks. The project team gathered their feedback through a series of end-user meetings and online questionnaires. Subject to feasibility, this feedback was then incorporated into the search functions of the site.
Originally, the site only included the data from what is called ‘Historic Hansard’, Hansard data between 1803-2004. At the beginning of December 2019, the data between 2005 and the 2019 prorogation of parliament was added to the site. Since February 2021 the site includes all Hansard reports until the end of February 2021.
Currently, improvements are still being made to the site. The project team is exploring adding various other search functions, and incorporating the feedback of users. Your suggestions are therefore more than welcome! Please refer to the “Contribute” page to learn how you can contribute your suggestions.
The Hansard at Huddersfield project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, grant reference AH/R007136/1.