Hansard DB
Just finished a paper to send off on a project that takes up a big portion of my PhD: Hansard DB. The issue it solves is fairly straightforward. Hansard is a pain to use if you’re trying to do anything remotely interesting because you have to go on Parlinfo and grab all the individual documents rather than getting the ones you need out of a database – so I tried to fix that with a local database you can download and integrate yourself.
But this accessibility also poses other problems. I don’t want to hand out this resource without acknowledging the limitations of how we can interpret its content. So a lot of the paper talks about the epistemic limitations of Hansard for looking at parliamentary speech, and importantly, what is lost in transforming our parliamentarians’ words and actions into text.