HANSARD at HUDDERSFIELD
Welcome to Hansard at Huddersfield! Explore the official, substantially verbatim report of what was said in both houses of Parliament between 1803-2021 through various search functions and interactive visualisations.
Please note this search tool is experimental, and therefore subject to change.
The Website
The Project
Blog
Guidance
Illustrations
About us
Acknowledgements
Feedback
The Website
The Hansard at Huddersfield site offers user-friendly search functions that make possible the perusal of linguistic, historical and thematic trends in UK Chamber debates between 1803-2021. The search functions present their results using clear visualisations that aid straightforward interpretation. These tools enable the uncomplicated exploration of, for example, the importance of a particular topic in parliamentary debate or the framing of a speaker’s stance towards a debate topic. Exploration of these kinds of patterns benefits research by readily providing empirical evidence for the way UK MPs and Peers engage in parliamentary debate.
Brochure
A short, illustrative description of Hansard at Huddersfield’s aims and search functions.
The Project
The Hansard at Huddersfield web application offers ways of exploring Chamber debates from both Houses of Parliament that go beyond searching for individual debates. Its search functions produce visualisations of language patterns in Hansard across time, across speakers and across debate titles that would be too time-consuming to find manually.
Created by academics with backgrounds in linguistics and computer science, the web application aims to help policy-makers, researchers and teachers to highlight, visualise and interpret trends of parliamentary debate that they cannot readily find using the official Hansard website. Consultation with likely end-users was held prior to and during the development of the Hansard at Huddersfield web application to ensure that its search tools meet real-world needs. As a result, Hansard at Huddersfield provides search functions that complement those of the official Hansard website.
Technologies Used
The technological details of the search functions of this site.
Outputs
Publications about Hansard at Huddersfield for academic audiences.
Events
Details about upcoming and past workshops about using the Hansard at Huddersfield tool.
Outputs
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Pre-print journal article
Lunen, A. von, Sanjurjo González, H., Jeffries, L. & Stradling, F. (Forthcoming). Hansard at Huddersfield: Adapting Corpus Linguistic Methods for Non-Specialist Use. -
Book Chapter (Forthcoming)
Jeffries, L., Stradling, F., Lunen von, A. & Sanjurjo Gonzalez, H. (Forthcoming). Hansard at Huddersfield: streamlined corpus methods and interactive visualisations to pursue research aims beyond corpus linguistics. In M. Korhonen, H. Kotze & J. Tyrkkö (Eds.), Exploring Language and Society with Big Data: Parliamentary discourse across time and space (pp. XX-XX). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. -
Conference Presentation
Jeffries, L. & Sanjurjo-González, H. (2019). Making Hansard accessible to non-expert users through data visualisation. Talk presented at ICAME40 conference. Neuchâtel, Switzerland. -
Conference Presentation
Jeffries, L. & Sanjurjo-González, H. (2019). Making corpus-based searching accessible for non-expert users: the case of Hansard. Talk presented at XI International Conference on Corpus Linguistics (CILC 2019) conference. Valencia, Spain. -
Blog Post
De Jager, F. (2018, May 28). Hansard at Huddersfield: Improving Democracy Through Technology. AHRC Blog. -
Blog Post
Jeffries, L., De Jager, F. (2019, March 6). Democratising Hansard: continuing to improve the accessibility of parliamentary records. Democratic Audit. -
Blog Post
Jeffries, L., De Jager, F. (2019, March 9). Democratising Hansard: continuing to improve the accessibility of parliamentary records. LSE Blog. -
Blog Post
Jeffries, L. (2019, April 1). Hansard at Huddersfield: Making democracy more searchable. History of Parliament Blog.
Academic Outputs
Blogs
Events
Interested to learn what you may use Hansard at Huddersfield for? Find here upcoming workshops that aim to demonstrate the potential of our site for your research. If you cannot make any of these workshops, please get in touch by emailing hansard@hud.ac.uk to see if we can arrange to visit you and/or your organisation.
Upcoming events
Past events
Virtual Event 27th January 20214-6pm Online Event by University of Westminister
Workshop People's History Museum 6th March 2020 Manchester, New Ct St, M3 3ER: People's History Museum
Workshop University of Leeds 11th December 2019 Leeds, Baines Wing SR 1.06: University of Leeds
Workshop Goldsmiths 19th November 2019 London, Margaret MacMillan Building, Goldsmiths: University of London
Workshop British Library 24th September 2019 London, British Library
Launch event 13th March 2019 Huddersfield, Heritage Quay: University of Huddersfield
Launch event 6th March 2019 London, House of Lords: Houses of Parliament
End-user event 11th December 2018 Huddersfield, Oastler Building: University of Huddersfield
End-user event 6th December 2018 London, InTuition House
End-user event 18th July 2018 London, Friends House
End-user event 11th July 2018 Huddersfield, Oastler Building: University of Huddersfield
Guidance
User Guide
A detailed guide to all the functionality of the Hansard at Huddersfield site.
Brochure for Teachers and Researchers
Hansard at Huddersfield’s search functions illustrated for purposes of teaching and researching socio-political topics.
6th Form Guide
A detailed guide to using Hansard and Hansard at Huddersfield as a resource for 6th form research projects.
Citing Our Website
Referencing guidance for citing Hansard at Huddersfield.
Citing our website
All works which use or refer to this site should acknowledge the source by means of bibliographic citation. If you have used it in your work, please let us have details and (if possible) copies of any internal or published work drawing on the website. We are also particularly interested in hearing from you how you have used the site and for what purpose. You can contact us on hansard@hud.ac.uk.
– If you would like to use a figure or other data that you have downloaded from our site, please use the following citation format:
Author (Date). “Search word(s), years” [Figure]. Publisher. Available online at: Website Title.
Example:
Hansard at Huddersfield (2019). “Charity, 1803-2004” [Figure]. University of Huddersfield. Available from: https://hansard.hud.ac.uk.
– When citing the entire website in-text, please give the whole address of our site:
Example:
Hansard at Huddersfield is a wonderful interactive site to study the language of parliament (https://hansard.hud.ac.uk).
– The citation format for footnotes or the reference section of publications is:
Author, (Date). Title. Publisher. Available online at: Website title.
Example:
Hansard at Huddersfield Project (2018). ‘Hansard at Huddersfield’. University of Huddersfield. Available online at: https://hansard.hud.ac.uk
Illustrations
Case Studies
Simple sample studies that illustrate how search functions can be combined into a larger study.
Others using Hansard at Huddersfield
Representative use of Hansard at Huddersfield tools by policymakers, researchers, and journalists.
Case Studies
Download here a number of sample case studies that exemplify the different ways this site’s tools may be used and their results interpreted to help answer research questions about the way parliamentarians discuss topics relevant to their governance of the UK.
We are working on developing the range of topics covered in these case studies. If you would like to suggest a topic, please get in touch on hansard@hud.ac.uk.
Austerity
Peterloo
Slavery
Brexit
Others Using Hansard at Huddersfield
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Journal Article
Brinkley, L. (2018). Innovation versus Tradition in Historical Research Methods: The ‘Digital Turn’. Emergence X, 34-48 -
Journal Article
McKay, L. (2020). Does constituency focus improve attitudes to MPs? A test for the UK. The Journal of Legislative Studies 26(1), 1-26, DOI: 10.1080/13572334.2020.1726635 -
Conference Proceedings
Coole, M., Rayson, P., Mariani, J. (2020). Unfinished Business: Construction and Maintenance of a Semantically Tagged Historical Parliamentary Corpus, UK Hansard from 1803 to the present day. Proceedings of ParlaCLARIN II Workshop, Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2020), Marseille, 23-27. -
Blog Post
Hart, G. (2020, July 2). Using Hansard at Huddersfield for Historical Research: The Spanish Flu of 1918. Hansard at Huddersfield. -
Blog Post
Levin, J. (2019, October 8). Resource: Cobbett’s Parliamentary History. Alsatia. -
Blog Post
Navickas, K. (N.D.) Definitions of Public Space. History of Public Space. -
News Article
Overton, I. (2021, February 12). UR-FASCISM? The Parliamentary Language that Defines the UK. Byline Times. -
Presentation
Navickas, K. (2019). "'Right of Public Meeting' in Hansard" [PowerPoint Slide]. Paper presented at "Remembering Peterloo: protest, satire and reform", London, 11 July 2019. -
Victorian Commons
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Parliamentary archives
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Clarin UK consortium
Academic Articles and Conference Proceedings
Blogs
News Outlets
Presentations
Website Links
About us
With joint expertise in linguistics, computer science and history, our team has worked since March 2018 to produce an accessible site with search tools that aid the straightforward exploration and interpretation of overarching trends and patterns in Hansard. We adapted expert software to study language patterns in large databases of text by combining some of its most common tools with interactive visualisations, aiming to help non-linguists mine the data’s potential without needing to master complex software packages
The Team
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Lesley Jeffries
Principal Investigator -
Marc Alexander
Co-investigator (SAMUELS) -
Alex von Lunen
Co-Investigator (Technical lead) -
Hugo Sanjurjo-González
Research Fellow (Programmer)
(2018-2020) -
Fransina Stradling
Research Assistant -
Paul Crossley
Programmer
(2021-Present)
Contact details
Linguistics and Modern Languages
School of Music, Humanities and Media
Oastler Building, OA4/15
Queensgate
Huddersfield
HD1 3DH
+44 1484472910
hansard@hud.ac.uk
Acknowledgements
Partners
Significant contributors without whom various aspects of our project would not have succeeded.
Acknowledgements
Our thanks go out to those who have contributed data or feedback to the development of our website.
Partners
Various aspects of the Hansard at Huddersfield project would not have succeeded without the enthusiastic contributions of our three main partner organisations.
Hellenic OCR Team
We are working with the Hellenic OCR Team, which is a crowd-sourced project aimed at digitising proceedings in the Greek parliament. Our Principal Investigator, Lesley Jeffries, and Hellenic OCR Team Co-Founders George Mikros and Fotis Fitsilis have agreed on the exchange of knowhow, methods and code to jointly tackle common challenges that are related not only to data openness but also to increased visibility and understanding of parliamentary data sources. Future plans resulting from this partnership may include joint conference announcements and scientific publications in the area of computational linguistics.
John Vice (Editor Hansard Lords) and Jack Homer (Editor Hansard Commons)
We have been working in partnership with Hansard in Westminster from the outset. We have had the support and cooperation of the editors and their staff in accessing the Hansard data and in developing the functionality of our site. We are also in discussion with Hansard about the future of our site.
The History of Parliament Trust
The History of Parliament Trust has been one of our key supporters and has communicated with its networks about the website. They have attended end-user meetings, given us feedback about the site and co-organised a workshop to introduce new end-users to the site.
Acknowledgements
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Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Funder -
SAMUELS
Predecessor -
Hansard
Provided Hansard data -
Wikidata British Politicians
Provided MP data -
Andrew Gray (Wikidata)
Provided MP data -
Dr Andy Mycock
End-user -
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
End-user -
Centre for Disability Studies
End-user -
Democratic Audit
End-user -
Equality and Human Rights Commission
End-user -
Dr Gavin Hart
End-user -
Heritage Quay
End-user -
History of Parliament
End-user
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House of Commons Library
End-user -
Institute for Government
End-user -
Kirklees Democracy Commission
End-user -
LKMco
End-user -
Migration Yorkshire
End-user -
Parliamentary Digital Service
End-user -
Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology
End-user -
People’s History Museum
End-user -
The Green Party
End-user -
Theos
End-user -
TheyWorkForYou
End-user -
The Young Foundation
End-user -
Dr Thomas Loughran
End-user
Feedback
Have you found any bugs or have you got any other feedback on the website? We are hoping to increase its functionality in due course, but there are some restrictions on what is possible.
You can contact us by either emailing us at hansard@hud.ac.uk or by using the form below. We will do our best to look into your feedback as soon as we can.
We are particularly interested in hearing from you how you have used the site and for what purpose. If you use it in your work, please let us have details and (if possible) copies of any internal or published work drawing on the website.