“Digital Parliamentary Data in Action (DiPaDA 2024)”
Workshop co-located with the 8th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference (DHNB 2024, May 27-31)
Post-proceedings submission site: https://www.conftool.org/dhnb2025/ .
Reykjavík, Iceland, Tuesday 28 May 2024 at 9.00-16.00
Recent years have seen the emergence of new parliamentary datasets that highlight multidisciplinary opportunities and challenges in research, and in 2022 the first “Digital Parliamentary Data in Action” workshop took place in connection with the DHNB conference in Uppsala. Now we plan to organize the second DiPaDA 2024 workshop in connection with the Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries (DHNB) Conference May 27–31, 2024 in Reykjavík, Iceland. Selected papers will be published after peer review in the journal Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publications https://journals.uio.no/dhnbpub/about (see timeline below). This year’s workshop is organized with support from the two Swedish national research infrastructures, Huminfra and Swe-Clarin.
As the title of the workshop emphasises, Parliamentary Data “in Action” aims to highlight the use of data in ongoing research projects and infrastructure development. New parliamentary datasets have enabled researchers to engage in novel ways in exploring and studying parliamentary culture, media and politics, polemics and consensus, and other areas where parliamentary debates function as a lens on societal and cultural matters. At the same time, ongoing research and infrastructure projects have highlighted the limitations of these “first-generation” datasets in their scope, structure, and usability. This has led to demands on improvements regarding OCR-quality, metadata, markup processes, and transforming national datasets into uniform advanced data structures, such as Parla-CLARIN and Linked Data.
The accessibility of parliamentary data is a democratic issue and raises questions about how such datasets can be used to empower citizen participation and enhance the transparency of political work and decision-making. Hence, curation and research of parliamentary records, as well as the development of new tools and user interfaces relevant for the parliamentary data, are embedded in critical societal discussions and have consequences from both scholarly and citizen perspectives.
These developments have led to enhanced opportunities and challenges for research and development. The workshop therefore aims to bring together scholars across different disciplines to explore and showcase results and ongoing work on creating and curating datasets, publishing, and using digital parliamentary data in Digital Humanities research and applications. The outcomes aim to foster interaction between scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and computational sciences.
The workshop abstracts here as pdf.
Workshop programme:
09:00-09:10 Welcome (Organizing Committee)
09:10-09:30 Transcriber effects in the Icelandic parliament corpus
Anton Karl Ingason, Lilja Björk Stefánsdóttir
09:30-10:00 Augmenting the Analysis of Political Discourse: A Word Embedding and Context-sensitive Methodological Approach to the Swedish Parliamentary Corpus
Lejf-Jöran Olson, Daniel Brodén, Mats Fridlund, Magnus P. Ängsal, Patrik Öhberg
10:00-10:30 Break
10:30-11:00 Parliaments as Networks of Power: The Analysis of Power and Gender Relations in Selected European Parliaments
Jure Skubic
11:00-11:20 “Matrikelmoderation”, what else? Topic Modeling of the Holy Roman Empire’s Imperial Diet Records of 1576
Roman Bleier, Florian Zeilinger
11:20-11:40 Reppin’ your constituency? Geographical Representation in Swedish Parliamentary Speech
Albert Wendsjö
11:40-12:00 The Relevance of AI: Perspectives from the British and Slovenian Parliament
Ajda Pretnar Žagar, David Moats
12:00-13:00 Lunch break
13:00-13:30 Decoding the parliamentary debate on marketization of education in Sweden through computational analyses
Eric Borgström, Martin Karlsson, Christian Lundahl
13:30-13:50 Bilingual Parliament? Functions of Swedish, English and Latin in the Parliament of Finland
Anna Ristilä
13:50-14:10 Accessing nature before “allemansrätten”? Combining two national parliament datasets to study a tradition before it was named
Matti La Mela
14:10-14:30 Finding Patterns across Multiple Time Series Datasets: Democracy in the Twentieth-century Political Discourses in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland
Risto Turunen, Hugo Bonin, Pasi Ihalainen, Jani Marjanen
14:30-15:00 Break
15:00-15:30 The Politics of Compound Neologisms: A Novel Methodology for Mining of Conceptual Transformations in Swedish Parliamentary Discourse and Data
Daniel Brodén, Claes Ohlsson, Henrik Björk, Mats Fridlund, Leif-Jöran Olsson, Leif Runefelt, Shafqat M. Virk, Magnus P. Ängsal
15:30-16:00 Concluding discussion
Submissions, Proceedings, and Workshop Participation
At DiPaDA 2022 there were 17 papers submitted and presented at a full-day workshop and we hope for a similar turnout for DiPaDA 2024. The peer-reviewed workshop proceedings have been published here: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3133/
We solicit abstract submissions in two forms: long presentations (abstract of 1,000–2,000 words for 20 min presentations) and short presentations (abstract of 500–1,000 words for 10 min presentations). The submissions will be peer-reviewed, and the accepted submissions will be presented at the workshop. After the workshop the presenters will be invited to submit reworked conference presentations in the form of short (4–8 pages) or long (8–16 pages) articles for peer-review and publication in the workshop proceedings in the online diamond open access publication DHNB Publications (https://journals.uio.no/dhnbpub/about). The layout of the papers should follow the one-column DHNB PUB template, available in LaTeX/Overleaf, and docx format. The publication contributions will be submitted through the ConfTool conference management system: https://www.conftool.org/dhnb2025/ . Expected publication of the proceedings is in December 2024 according to the timeline below.
At least one author of each paper needs to register to the DHNB 2024 conference in order to participate in the workshop. The workshop is open for all conference participants.
Archived conference website: https://dhnb.eu/past-conferences/dhnb2024/
Topics of Interest for the workshop include but are not limited to:
- analysis of political discourse or concepts by using parliamentary data
- comparative studies across gender, party, and geographical representation using parliamentary data
- compilation and annotation of parliamentary data in textual and/or spoken format
- methods and tools for research and accessibility of parliamentary data
- political network analysis using parliamentary data
- parliamentary culture and parliamentary politics
- parliamentary data compared with other types of political discourse
- parliamentary data and multilingual studies
- prosopographical approaches to parliaments and parliamentary data
- querying and visualisation of parliamentary data
- semantic processing and linked parliamentary data
Important Dates
- March 15: Deadline for submitting the abstracts (500-1.000 words OR 1.000-2.000 words)
- March 29: Notification of acceptance/rejection
- May 14: Deadline for updated abstracts
- May 27/28: The workshop takes place
Post-proceedings Timeline:
- October 15 (prev. September 16 – technical issues): Submission of final short or long papers for DiPaDA 2024 post proceedings: https://www.conftool.org/dhnb2025/
- November 18: Notification of acceptance/revisions
- December 9: Submission of camera-ready manuscript
- December 2024: Publication of Post-proceedings
Workshop Organizing Committee
- Daniel Brodén, GRIDH, University of Gothenburg (co-chair)
- Mats Fridlund, GRIDH, University of Gothenburg (co-chair)
- Matti La Mela, ALM, Uppsala University (co-chair)
- Gustaf Nelhans, SSLIS, University of Borås (co-chair)
- Fredrik Mohammadi Norén, School of Arts and Communication, SWERIK, Malmö University (co-chair)
- Leif-Jöran Olsson, Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg (co-chair)
- Albert Wendsjö, Dept. of Political Science, University of Gothenburg (chair)
- Magnus P. Ängsal, Dept. of Languages and Literatures, University of Gothenburg (co-chair)
- Patrik Öhberg, The SOM Institute, University of Gothenburg (co-chair)
Workshop Programme Committee
- Kaspar Beelen, The Alan Turing Institute
- Daniel Brodén, GRIDH, University of Gothenburg
- Kimmo Elo, University of Turku
- Tomaž Erjavec, Jozef Stefan Institute
- Darja Fišer, University of Ljubljana
- Mats Fridlund, GRIDH, University of Gothenburg
- Jo Guldi, Emory University
- Eero Hyvönen, Aalto University and University of Helsinki (HELDIG)
- Pasi Ihalainen, University of Jyväskylä
- Matti La Mela, Uppsala University
- Måns Magnusson, Uppsala University
- Bruno Martins, University of Lisbon
- Costanza Navarretta, University of Copenhagen
- Gustaf Nelhans, SSLIS, University of Borås
- Fredrik Mohammadi Norén, Malmö University
- Leif-Jöran Olsson, Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg
- Jouni Tuominen, University of Helsinki, Aalto University
- Albert Wendsjö, University of Gothenburg
- Magnus P. Ängsal, Dept. of Languages and Literatures, University of Gothenburg
- Patrik Öhberg, The SOM Institute, University of Gothenburg
Contact:
Albert Wendsjö, Daniel Brodén, Mats Fridlund & Matti La Mela