Digitising Hansard putting 200 years of parliamentary debates online

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Digitising Hansard putting 200 years of
parliamentary debates online

• Edward Wood
• Programme Director
• House of Commons

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Digitising Hansard

• the history of Hansard
• digitising Hansard scanning and OCR
• database and front end

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Hansard

• the official report of debates in Parliament
• actually an unofficial private enterprise at
  first
• nationalised in 1909
• early reports written in the third person
• eventually developed into a (nearly) verbatim
  account

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• though not strictly verbatim, it is
  substantially the verbatim report, with
  repetitions and redundancies omitted and with
  obvious mistakes corrected, but ... on the
  other hand leaves out nothing that adds to the
  meaning of the speech or illustrates the
  argument.

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why digitise?

• enable preservation
• conservation is expensive
• increase access
• increase usability
• re-use physical storage space
• costs have fallen significantly
• quality improving steadily

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doing the work

• overseas contractor chosen for cost and quality
• scanning from dis-bound originals
• image, text and metadata captured
• data capture automated but with significant
  manual intervention to increase quality
• triple-compare process improves OCR quality
• volumes from 1803 2005 were digitised
• nearly 3 million pages

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developing a web interface

• drivers
• free access
• meaningful search across a large amount of data
• work closely with users
• keep costs down

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developing a web interface

• solution
• experimental approach web 2.0 feel
• text only
• faceting for intuitive navigation and search
• clean look and feel
• give it away!?
• http//www.parliament.uk/publications/
  archives.cfm

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methodology and progress

• small team of developers working closely with
  users (inside and outside Parliament)?
• d/b and front end use micro formats approach
• XML is parsed into HTML before loading into the
  database
• data back to 1803 has been loaded (around 50
  volumes missing)?
• public discussion group and issues log

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faceted classification

• assignment of multiple classifications to an
  object
• the material can thus be presented in a variety
  of ways
• facets include
• date
• volume number
• monarch
• chamber
• content type (debates or questions)?
• constituencies
• Members of Parliament
• offices held

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other features

• references using the standard format can be
  located using the search box
• HC Deb Vol 385 13 May 2002 c498
• predictable URLs
• http//hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1941/m
  ay/07/war-situation
• pages created for
• individual Members of Parliament
• constituencies
• acts
• bills
• divisions

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http//hansard.millbanksystems.com

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developing the functionality...

• disambiguating the metadata
• (Mr Smith, Mr John Smith, John Smith...)?
• tag clouds
• machine-readable divisions
• geographical interface

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http//hansard.millbanksystems.com

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http//hansard.millbanksystems.com