The website will be launched in the Palace of Westminster at 5.00p.m. on 6 March (register here to attend), followed by a drinks reception, and in Huddersfield on 13 March in Heritage Quay, starting at 11.30am and including lunch. Please register.

The Hansard at Huddersfield project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/R007136/1), has been working for a year to produce a new type of interface for Hansard, the official record of parliamentary debate. This website aims to answer questions that the public and professional end-users (such as journalists, historians, teachers, lobbyists) may wish to ask. Here are some examples:
When were the Lords most busy debating ‘Catholics’?
How did MPs use the word ‘austerity’ in the postwar period and did it differ when it came back in the 1970s and 1980s?
Have parliamentarians discussed poverty or wealth most since 1803? Have they discussed the poor or the rich most?
What was the peak year for the use of ‘New Labour’ in parliamentary debate?

These searches and others are supported by attractive visualisations of the results which can be downloaded for application in the end-users’ own work. Principal Investigator, Professor Lesley Jeffries, says “Our aim has been to make the rich resource of Hansard more appealing to the casual user, but also more readily searchable by professionals wanting to see patterns of behaviour in parliament, through patterns of language use. We look forward to seeing how it is used and by whom.” Users of the site are encouraged to give the team feedback as the site will be developed further over the coming months.