Parliamentary Discourse
Enhancing the text of Hansard from 1803-2003
for linguists, historians, cultural scholars and the public.
The Parliamentary Discourse project will enhance and enrich data from two hundred years of the UK Parliament in order to expose it to a wider audience within Higher Eductation and to the general public.
The project is a collaboration between the University of Glasgow Enroller project (a joint initiative of the National e-Science Centre and Glasgow's College of Arts) and two further partners:
the General Architecture for Text Engineering project (GATE) at the University of Sheffield, and the UCREL centre for language processing research at Lancaster University.
Through combining the expertise and infrastructure of Enroller with the advanced text-processing techniques of the project's partners and the high-quality data provided by Parliament, we will maximize the potential and exposure of this unique resource for linguists, historians, cultural scholars, and the citizen.
The project is funded by JISC and is under active development during 2011.
Lead Institution: University of Glasgow
The Parliamentary Discourse project team is as follows.
For further details of each team member,
please select the link below:
Professor Christian Kay | Principal Investigator | University of Glasgow
Christian Kay is Professor Emeritus of English Language at the University of Glasgow. She joined the department in 1969 as a Research Assistant on the Historical Thesaurus of English; forty years later, in 2009, she brought the project to publication as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED). The thesaurus met with considerable media interest and critical acclaim, winning the Saltire Society Research Book of the Year Award in 2009. Sales of the HTOED have far exceed expectations, and royalties are now being used to fund postgraduate scholarships in English language. Professor Kay's primary research interests are in historical semantics, classification, and the application of the cognitive semantics paradigm to the development of the English lexicon. In addition to the HTOED, a classification of the English lexicon from Old English to the present day, she co-edited A Thesaurus of Old English (Roberts and Kay, 2000), and directed its online version (British Academy funded, 2005). She also founded the
Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) and contributed to its sucessor, the
Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (CMSW).
Jean Anderson | Project Director | University of Glasgow
Jean Anderson is the Resource Development Officer for the School of Critical Studies and a member of the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow. She is the Principal Investigator for Enroller and was co-director of the EPSRC and AHRC funded
Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) project.
Dr Marc Alexander | Research Associate | University of Glasgow
Marc Alexander was previously the Research Assistant for Enroller (2009 - May 2011) and then the Research Associate for Parliamentary Discourse. The majority of his research focuses on the digital and cognitive study of lingustic meaning, while his Ph.D. examines the discourse semantics and cognitive stylistics of a corpus of scientific popularisations. He has worked with the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary for six years and is currently researching its use in semantic and lexicological studies. His doctoral research was supported by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland.
Dr Andrew Struan | Project Historian | International Center for Jefferson Studies, Monticello / University of Glasgow
Andrew Struan is an early-career academic historian with interests in British parliamentary politics. He is the Gilder-Lehrman Research Fellow (2011-12) at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, Virginia and an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. Both his Ph.D. and his ongoing research focus on the role of British parliamentarians in an Atlantic and global setting. He is also presently Co-Investigator on an HEA-funded project which incorporates linguistic resources into the teaching and research of history.
Johanna Green | Project Administrator | University of Glasgow
Johanna Green is the Research Assistant for Enroller (May 2011 - present; previously Research Project Assistant) and also the Project Administrator for Parliamentary Discourse. Prior to this, she worked as a Thesaurus Assistant with the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary for four years. Johanna held the William Lauchlan Mann Memorial Prize during her M.Litt. at the Glasgow Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (2005-6) and she is currently completing her Ph.D. in English Language at the University of Glasgow. Her doctoral thesis (due 2012) is a critical edition of the Exeter Book's Judgement Day I and Resignation A and B; her research has previously been supported by an award from the
Lynne Grundy Memorial Trust (2008).
Sulman Sarwar | eScience Research Associate | NeSC
Dr Reede Ren | Research Associate Programmer | NeSC
Dr John Watt | Research Associate Grid Engineer | NeSC
Associated Researchers:
Dr Paul Rayson | UCREL | Lancaster University
Wim Peters | GATE | University of Sheffield
Professor Richard Sinnott | Director of eResearch | University of Melbourne
Latest News
A History of Hansard
Read our latest blog on the history of Hansard, written by the project's consulting historian Dr Andrew Struan.
The Parliamentary Discourse project is now on Twitter! To hear more about the project live as it happens, follow us: @ParlDisc
Project Blog
The project now has its own blog! Join us at JISC Involve and hear about the project's recent developments: http://parldisc.jiscinvolve.org/wp/
To contact the project team, please email: enroller@arts.gla.ac.uk
The project can also be contacted as follows:
Room 207, Gregory Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow | Scotland | UK
G12 8QQ
Tel: +44 (0)141 330 6501
Twitter: @ParlDisc