A forum for sharing best practices
organized by the OPTED network
with the support of H2020 on 15th June, 2022

Place: Brussels

Venue: European Parliament, 60 rue Wiertz 60 B-1047 – Bruxelles

Date: June 15th, 2022

Format: Hybrid (On-site + streamed online for registered participants)

Work language: English (interpretation is provided upon request)

AIMS OF THE FORUM

The aim of the conference is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas related to sharing and analyzing parliamentary text data between official archives and different user groups from the social sciences and the civil society. Large-scale text analyses have great potential for enhancing the transparency and understanding of political decision-making and legislative bodies offer a vast treasure chest of data for social scientists, data journalists, or other civil society initiatives. However, due to a number of factors these troves are often left unexplored. Obstacles include lacking awareness of tools and data sources or are of technical nature such as the lack of APIs, incompatibility of legacy IT platforms with cutting edge research tools, or limitations on direct queries to the databases behind archival websites. 

The Forum brings together maintainers of different parliamentary archives, researchers and data aficionados from the civil society to create a place for mutual learning, for identifying gaps and obstacles, as well as the exchange of best practices. Avenues for a better realization of the potential of political text analyses will also be discussed on both the national and EU level. In sum, the conference will allow for creating a better infrastructure of parliamentary archives for scientific and civil society analysis. Following the conference a report will summarize these findings which will be disseminated to relevant stakeholders in the European policy space. 

Please find more information on confirmed speakers on our website: https://data4parliaments.org/confirmed-speakers/

The conference will take place in the building of the European Parliament in Brussels on June 15th, 2022. Please find information on registration here. Participation is free and covers coffee breaks, lunch and the conference dinner. Please register before May 15th, 2022. The preliminary program is available here. Please check back regularly for more information on speakers and themes.

REGISTER FOR THE EVENT HERE