The Transcription and Representation of Spoken Political Discourse in the UK House of Commons

Abstract

This paper considers the representation of spoken political discourse through the transcription practices of the House of Commons. It considers how the Hansard method of transcription represents the oral debates during the weekly parliamentary sessions of Prime Minister's questions in three areas: lexical and grammatical fidelity, performance characteristics and interruptions from the audience. The paper also considers how accurately and faithfully speakers in the House quote from Hansard during these sessions as they pursue their arguments. The findings suggest that while Hansard does what it purports to do, modern transcription methods and digital representations necessitate additional tools to augment this system. We argue the case for a more representational, multi-tool approach to the transcription of discourse.

Fuentes tradicionales y herramientas digitales: explorando los Diarios de Sesiones del Congreso Nacional durante el primer peronismo con Gephi

“…3 Esto no siempre es así en este tipo de publicaciones. Por ejemplo, los libros de debates parlamentarios del Reino Unido -conocidos como Hansard-omiten este tipo de acotaciones (Cribb & Rochford, 2018). del Poder Ejecutivo y del Gabinete de ministros, las autoridades y miembros de las dos Cámaras legislativas, la composición de las comisiones parlamentarias, planillas de asistencia para las sesiones y comisiones, proyectos presentados, aprobados y archivados durante cada período, etc.…”

Building, Encoding, and Annotating a Corpus of Parliamentary Debates in TEI XML: A Cross-Linguistic Account

“…Second, being at the interface between spoken and written data, parliamentary discourse gives access to a wide range of discourse features (see Vuković [2012] for a comparison of pre-prepared and spontaneous parliamentary discourse at the House of Commons). Even if ocial proceedings/ transcripts do not adequately capture the interactional nature of the events such as pauses and hesitations (see Cribb and Rochford [2018] for an example based on the House of Commons), we adopted a TEI structure based on spoken data rather than drama-oriented data in order to allow for further projects that would take into consideration the interactional nature of plenary sessions.…”