OPTED – Observatory for Political Texts in European Democracies
OPTED Overview
OPTED is a design study that lays the foundation for an infrastructure that will serve a major hub for political text analysis in Europe. The EU-funded H2020 project involves 17 research institutions organized in 10 work packages which collaboratively work on designing the building blocks of the infrastructure. Among the objectives of the infrastructure are scientific community building, the extension of text analysis tools, and learning materials for social scientists, the broader public and journalists. An institutionalization of the field of political text analysis by means of a common European infrastructure will yield more impactful, sustainable, resource saving, innovative, democratic, non-discriminatory and substantially meaningful research landscape. Work Package 5 includes contributions from the Centre for Social Science, Hungarian Academy of Science, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin and the Cologne Center of Comparative Politics.
Work Package 5 – Parliamentary, government and legal texts
Work package 5 on “Parliamentary, government and legal texts” covers parliaments in Europe at the national and supranational level. It aims to provide a pilot infrastructure for the collection, harmonization, publication, and analysis of textual data related to parliamentary speeches as well as legislation, bills, amendments and laws. The work package pursues four objectives: First, the WP will create and publish an inventory of available parliamentary text corpora on speeches and legislation in Europe. Second, it will provide a demonstration of how an integrated database of parliamentary speeches and legislation at national and EU level can be set up. This pilot database, entitled ParlLawSpeech, will focus on creating links between parliamentary speeches and legislative texts. Third, it will engage in active exchange with relevant officials in parliaments as well as data scientists to achieve mutually beneficial data access opportunities. Fourth, it will publish the pilot database ParlLawSpeech as an open source data set. In addition to providing a database ready for scientific analysis, the work package will provide training modules, tutorials, and a test framework of a generic API as well as an interactive website facilitating public access to systematic information from parliamentary text data.
Team of Work Package 5
Principal investigator: Prof. Dr. Sven-Oliver Proksch, Dr. Christian Rauh, Prof. Dr. Miklós Sebők
Doctoral researchers: Jan Schwalbach, Anna Székely
Funding
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research & innovation programme under Grant Agreement no. 951832.
Project duration
October 2020 – September 2023
For further information:
https://opted.eu/designing-an-infrastructure/wp5-parliamentary-government-and-legal-texts/
https://opted.eu