A metadata infrastructure for the analysis of parliamentary proceedings

This work-in-progress article discusses DILIPAD (Digging into Linked Parliamentary Data), a project funded under the Digging Into Data Challenge. DILIPAD aims to create an extensive corpus of structured XML data of parliamentary proceedings from three countries (United Kingdom, Netherlands and Canada) in order to enable large-scale diachronic analyses of their content. The corpora integrate the textual data of proceedings within contextual metadata encoded in the XML schema Parliamentary Metadata Language (PML). The article discusses the background to the project, the construction of the corpora and highlights they ways in which they may be used for quantitative and qualitative analysis.