Searching 72 years of parliamentary discourse with Pollux Political Corpora (PoliCorp)

January 13, 2025 12:50 PM

Pollux offers researchers an easy way to search and analyze political text collections (corpora) on a new experimental platform Pollux Political Corpora (PoliCorp). PoliCorp provides researchers with access to rich textual data, enabling in-depth analysis of parliamentary discourse over time.

PoliCorp currently contains data from the GermaParl corpus, a collection of transcripts of Bundestag debates, spanning 72 years of parliamentary debates - from 1949 to 2021 - and comprises over 958,000 speech contributions.

PoliCorp is designed to cater to the needs of researchers in political science and related disciplines. The user-friendly web interface facilitates efficient and straightforward data searching. The current version of the platform allows researchers to perform keyword-based searches within the corpus. Several search fields can be combined and logical filters can be used to uncover patterns and correlations. Researchers can download selected subcorpora free of charge in JSON format and use them for further analysis. Future enhancements will include advanced search capabilities (i.e. search by synonyms, topics, etc.) and integrated data analytics functionalities.

The PoliCorp Beta-Version is available here: https://demo-pollux.gesis.org/