Mapping Parliamentary Discourse
Problem
currently not available due to TU Wien budget cuts
The Parliament is a cornerstone of Austria’s political system. In its two chambers, elected representatives debate drafts for legislation and discuss enquiries with members of the government. Since 1996 the proceedings including speeches of all plenary sessions of the Parliament are electronically available as largely unstructured text (HTML). Additional background information is available from the Parliament’s website. This text collection offers a rich source for longitudinal analysis about Austria’s political system: e.g., thematic trends, political buzzword, networks of key speakers, text readability measures …
Aim
Investigate data availability and identify usage scenarios based on data/users/tasks.
Develop (semi-)automatic methods for extraction structured data from the stenographic minutes.
Design and prototypical implementation of an interactive visual interface.
Perform a user study to evaluate the developed paper/functional prototypes.
(The scope and depth of development are negotiable depending on the size of project in students/ECTS and the students’ interests.)
Other information
Resources:
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Stenographic minutes (unstructured text) http://www.parlament.gv.at/PAKT/STPROT/
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Tabular summary of parliament sessions http://www.parlament.gv.at/PAKT/PLENAR/
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Keyword search http://www.parlament.gv.at/PAKT/SW/
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Description on the Austrian Open Data portal http://data.gv.at/datensatz/?id=f317d7ef-e5cd-4ce6-9fbe-eb2261ffd64c
Introductory reading:
Aigner, W., Miksch, S., Schumann, H., & Tominski, C. (2011). Visualization of Time-Oriented Data. Berlin: Springer.
Görg, C., Liu, Z., & Stasko, J. (2013). Reflections on the evolution of the Jigsaw visual analytics system. Information Visualization. doi:10.1177/1473871613495674