The Parla-CLARIN Recommendations for Encoding Corpora of Parliamentary Proceedings

Parliamentary proceedings are a rich source of data that can be used by scholars in various humanities and social sciences disciplines. Unlike the sources of most other language corpora, parliamentary proceedings are not subject to copyright or personal privacy protections, and are typically available online, thus making them ideal for compilation into corpora and for open distribution. For these reasons many countries have already produced corpora of parliamentary proceedings, but each typically in their own encoding, limiting their comparability and utilization in a multilingual setting. In this paper we propose an encoding schema which could serve as an interchange format for parliamentary corpora compiled for the purposes of scholarly investigations. The schema, called Parla-CLARIN, was developed within the CLARIN research infrastructure, and is written as a TEI ODD which includes a TEI customization and prose guidelines with examples of use. We discuss the coverage and choices made in designing the recommendations, and give an overview of the guidelines. We also discuss two other standard schemas for encoding parliamentary data, Akoma Ntoso and RDF, and their relation to Parla-CLARIN. We conclude by presenting corpora already encoded in Parla-CLARIN and discussing further work, especially the provision of a set of example documents and of transformation scripts that would make the proposed encoding more usable

Populists and the Pandemic

Populists and the Pandemic examines the responses of populist political actors and parties in 22 countries around the globe to the COVID-19 pandemic, in terms of their attitudes, rhetoric, mobilization repertoires, and policy proposals. The responses of some populist leaders have received much public attention, as they denied the severity of the public health crisis, denigrated experts and data, looked for scapegoats, encouraged protests, questioned the legitimacy of liberal institutions, spread false information, and fueled conspiracies. But how widespread are those particular reactions? How much variation is there? What explains the variation that does exist? This volume considers these questions through critical analysis of countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa, by leading experts with deep knowledge of their respective cases. Some chapters focus on populist parties, others on charismatic populist leaders. Some countries examined are democracies, others autocracies. Some populists are left wing, others right wing. Some populists are in government, others in opposition. This variation allows for a panoramic consideration of factors that systematically influence or mediate populist responses to the pandemic. The book thus makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the intersection between two of the most pressing social and political challenges of our time. The book will be of interest to all those researching populism, extremism, and political parties and those more broadly interested in political science, public policy, sociology, communications, and economics

Reflektierte algorithmische Textanalyse. Interdisziplinäre(s) Arbeiten in der CRETA-Werkstatt

The Center for Reflected Text Analytics (CRETA) develops interdisciplinary mixed methods for text analytics in the research fields of the digital humanities. This volume is a collection of text analyses from specialty fields including literary studies, linguistics, the social sciences, and philosophy. It thus offers an overview of the methodology of the reflected algorithmic analysis of literary and non-literary texts