From parliamentary history to digital and computational history : a NLP-friendly TEI model for historical and contemporary parliamentary proceedings

Abstract

This paper introduces a new method for the digital and computational analysis of historical and contemporary parliamentary proceedings. It addresses the dichotomy in the utilization of these resources between historians and other disciplines, and emphasizes the significance of continuity in studying long-term phenomena. The paper presents an XML-TEI model specifically designed for encoding parliamentary documents from diverse temporal and regional contexts. This model is exemplified through the analysis of parliamentary debates from the French Chamber of Deputies (1889-1893). The first part of the paper discusses the motivations behind the model's development. The second part outlines the methodological choices in constructing the model and the need for schema adaptation. We subsequently detail our method for automatic encoding of such extensive corpora. Finally, we propose an approach to annotate parliamentary debates using natural language processing analyses, focusing on topic modeling. This study aims to enhance computational research in humanities, especially historical and political studies, by providing an efficient tool to harness the potential of the massive digitized parliamentary data