Hansard Debates through a Telescope: Two centuries of digital Parliamentary records

The Hansard Corpus (1803-2003) contains 7.6 million speeches from the UK Parliament, which are not verbatim. Its size – 1.6 billion words – means that it is particularly unwieldy to explore digitally. As a result, in 2015 it was tagged semantically using the tagset of the Historical Thesaurus of English in order to enable semantic queries and aggregation. In this talk, I will discuss what the corpus represents, the overall picture of the Parliamentary record from a semantic point of view (‘through a telescope’), and what such digital parliamentary records can tell us.

Marc Alexander is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Glasgow and is Director of the Historical Thesaurus of English. His research primarily focuses on the study of words, meaning, and effect in English, including historical lexicology, Parliamentary discourse from 1803 to the present, and the stylistics of detective fiction. He is also a trustee of the Glasgow Educational and Marshall Trust, and a trustee and the Chair of the Board of Directors of Scottish Language Dictionaries.