“Do 414 of these text files contain the first line of Waltzing Matilda?” - Betsy

“This corpus might contain a book about camel care. It probably doesn’t though.” - Sam

“I wish I’d chosen a smaller example dataset.” - Sam

“I think we might need more chairs…” - Eve

“We need more chairs!” - Eve

“I wrote down ‘introduce self’ so this is going well already.” - Sam

“We have created an award called the ‘Hames Award’ for the most workshops at ResBaz. Here is your prize t-shirt!” - Maca

Preparing for ResBaz….

Getting ready to put data in our portal…

WP7.1 & WP8.1 has been sent to various places for review….

Agonising over metadata. More agonising to come…

The cold weather has made all of our pets much more involved in our work….

It’s JUNE…

Meeting note: “playing whackamole with getting the plain text transcripts together”….

Meeting note: “called time on prepping the text”…

Draft data portal deployed at QCIF - still lots to do but it’s fun to see something! It’s real!….

RAIN…

Wrestling with bureaucratic document management and provenance 💪….

We missed Marissa!…

Something about data verification. Which is to say.. making sure we know where our Federal Hansard gaps are….

Making the website better, a good task for when we have no brain left for data wrangling…

Asked for numbers from the Productivity Commission work, but they’re too exciting, so they’ll get their own blog at some point….

Asparagus…

Caught up with CDL Enhanced Analytics, who are working on OCR for colonial Hansards….

Feels good to have brackets back…

On Tuesday RAPID-CDL was hosted by QUT Centre for Justice with an invited audience including Centre for Justice, DMRC, Centre for Decent Work and Industry, Centre for Data Science, School of Education, Digital Child Centre of Excellence.

We presented a workshop on “Digital Humanities: a conversation between data science and qualitative research”, showcasing past, present, and future research workflows enabled by the RAPID-CDL project.

In the second part of the workshop we had conversations with the researchers in the room about pragmatic considerations in working with parliamentary proceedings, and the opportunities afforded by RAPID-CDL. We truly appreciate everyone’s participation. We’ll be incorporating everything we learned directly into ongoing work in the project.

Half of the registered researchers had worked with parliamentary proceedings in a manual or qualitative way, and of those who had never worked with this data, more than half had not considered this as a data source.

RAPID-CDL takes care of some computing in order to enable researchers to get the most out of Hansard transcripts and other Public Interest documents. Contact us if you are interested!

Zzzz….

Zzz…

Finally got around to adding a background thank you Betsy….

Used up the allocation of brackets in last week’s post so now we’ll need to get by without for a while sorry if anything looks weird…

ARDC/LDaCA engagement meeting: anything that lowers the perceived barrier to entry is good (from an Eve scribble, not a direct quote)….

The cats have synced their calendars for coordinated daily yelling (11am, in case you’re curious)…

Several good chats with our HASS research infrastructure (RI) friends at LDaCA, AIO, and SIH….

Planned our first “Work From QCIF Day”…

Just finished our SECOND internal demo (LDaCA & QCIF)….

Finishing the first work packages report…

We’ve just released a structured dataset of the Federal Parliamentary debate on the Job-ready Graduates Package, at a moment when there is a call for submissions to reverse the policy.

But before we rehearse the familiar arguments, it’s worth returning to the source. Often what is said in media commentary does not clearly match the practicalities of government. Before making assumptions, return to the source. It will ensure the strongest submission possible.

Our project extracts Federal Hansard debates from the Parliament of Australia and converts them into clean, research-ready datasets.

This one includes:

• Every parliamentary reference to the Job-ready Graduates reforms
• Full speech text (not excerpts)
• Speaker metadata
• Links back to the official transcripts

No scrolling through webpages. No copy-paste assembly. Just structured debate ready for analysis, teaching, journalism, or submission writing.

If you’re preparing a submission, conducting research, teaching higher education policy, or simply want to check the rhetoric against the record, this dataset gives you the debate in a usable form.

📎 Dataset link

📣 Call for submissions

We’re building an open project that makes parliamentary debate more accessible, searchable, and usable for researchers, educators, journalists and advocates.

If you use it, let us know, and cite the dataset! And if you’d like access to similar datasets on other debates, follow the project here.

See this on LinkedIn

Thinking about raisins (currantly)….

The cat thing still…

Getting in touch with researchers….

E-introducing all our cats…