The tutorial Voices of the Parliament. A Corpus Approach to Parliamentary Discourse Research realised by Darja Fišer and Kristina Pahor de Maiti is now publicly available.
This tutorial shows the potential of richly annotated language corpora for research of the socio-cultural context and changes over time that are reflected through language use. The tutorial encourages students and scholars of modern languages, as well as users from other fields of digital humanities and social sciences who are interested in the study of socio-cultural phenomena through language, to engage with user-friendly digital tools for the analysis of large text collections. The tutorial is designed in a way that takes full advantage of both linguistic annotations and the available speaker and text metadata to formulate powerful quantitative queries that are then further extended with manual qualitative analysis in order to ensure adequate framing and interpretation of the results.
The tutorial demonstrates the potential of parliamentary corpora research via concordancers without the need for programming skills. No prior experience in using language corpora and corpus querying tools is required in order to follow this tutorial. While the same analysis could be carried out on any parliamentary corpus with similar annotations and metadata.
In this tutorial the siParl 2.0 corpus is used, which contains parliamentary debates of the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia from 1990 to 2018, although knowledge of Slovenian is not required to follow the tutorial. To try out the analyses in other languages, we invite you to explore a parliamentary corpus of your choice from those available through CLARIN.