Digital Parliamentary Data in Action 2026

Parliaments are central institutions of political life, and their records provide invaluable windows into the languages, cultures, and socio-historical dynamics of the past. With the growing availability of digitized and digital-born parliamentary datasets, historical parliamentary debates can now be explored in ways that bring new insights into the evolution of political ideas, rhetorical practices, cultural values, and institutional norms. They also allow scholars to examine how parliaments functioned as arenas of negotiation, contestation, and representation across different political systems and historical periods.

Yet working with historical parliamentary data presents significant challenges. Multilingual sources, outdated or inconsistent typographies, errors introduced through OCR, incomplete or missing metadata, and heterogenous transcription and markup practices complicate the creation of reliable and interoperable datasets. Addressing these difficulties requires collaboration across disciplines, from history, linguistics, and political science to information science and computational methods.

The conference invites contributions that engage with the opportunities and challenges of historical parliamentary data. We welcome papers that:

• Explore the cultural, linguistic, or political insights that can be gained from historical parliamentary records.
• Present methods for handling technical and methodological issues such as OCR quality, metadata gaps, or historical language variation.
• Showcase tools, interfaces, or analytical frameworks for making historical parliamentary data more accessible and usable for scholars, educators, or citizens.
• Reflect on standards, infrastructures, and practices that enable historical parliamentary datasets to be linked, compared, and analyzed across languages, countries, and time periods.

The accessibility and study of historical parliamentary data is not only a scholarly issue but also a democratic one: making past debates legible and open supports transparency, accountability, and public engagement with political history.

We therefore seek to bring together researchers from the humanities, social sciences, computer science, and cultural heritage sectors to share results, methods, and reflections on the creation, analysis, and use of historical parliamentary datasets. The aim is to foster dialogue across disciplines and to strengthen the foundations for future research on the political, cultural, and linguistic heritage preserved in parliamentary records.