The Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA), the RAPID-CDL project and the Sydney Informatics Hub, together with the Sydney Corpus Lab and the Computational Social Science Lab, invite you to 3 free in-person workshops for researchers, 29-30 September at the University of Sydney.
Each session stands alone: register for any one, or come to all 3.
Who are the workshops for?
The workshops are open to researchers from all disciplines and universities, HDR students especially welcome.
Workshop 1: Making the most of your qualitative transcripts with a bit of computing
Time: Tuesday 29 September, 2:00-3:30 pm
Location: Western Tower Boardroom (room S495, level 4), The Quadrangle (A14), The University of Sydney
Qualitative research projects sometimes get away from us and we find that we have more material from our interviews than we know what to do with. This workshop aims to give you a pathway for navigating ‘too much’ with a little bit of computational assistance and without giving up on the core qualitative foundation of your work.
We’ll work through a case study and some demonstration tools from the Language Data Commons of Australia to help you:
- Make the most of your transcripts by identifying consistency issues that will confuse a computer (and yourself and your collaborators)
- Work through the process of transforming some example transcripts into a more consistent and structured format
- Demonstrate some possibilities for computers to help you search and find things when you have ‘too much’
- Demonstrate computational methods that might help you address the ‘big picture’ or what you might be missing, while still being able to closely read your transcripts
Workshop 2: Getting Started with the Proceedings of Federal Parliament in Your Research
Time: Wednesday 30 September, 9:15-10:45 am
Location: Western Tower Boardroom (room S495, level 4), The Quadrangle (A14), The University of Sydney
125 years of Federal Parliament debates are on the record. Learn to find what your research needs with ParlInfo and RAPID-CDL tools.
The Proceedings of Australian Federal Parliament collectively form a record of every debate held in Australian Federal Parliament since Federation in 1901. Whether you’re interested in language, politics, society or history, there’s likely to be something in one of the 15,000 transcribed sessions that is relevant to your research, if you can find it!
This workshop will show you how to get started and make the most of these proceedings in your research. We’ll start with the necessary context of how Parliament works through their official transcripts and the ParlInfo search interface. Then we will show you how you can take things even further with the datasets and tools being created by the RAPID-CDL research infrastructure project to make it even easier to get what you need for your research.
Workshop 3: Analysing Parliamentary Discourse at Scale with the New Wordflow app
Time: Wednesday 30 September, 11:00 am-12:30 pm
*Location: Western Tower Boardroom (room S495, level 4), The Quadrangle (A14), The University of Sydney
Hands-on with LDaCA Wordflow, a free point-and-click text analysis app, on thousands of parliamentary debates. No coding needed.
You’ve found the debates you need. What can you do with several thousand of them at once?
This hands-on workshop introduces LDaCA Wordflow, a free point-and-click app for analysing text, built for researchers who don’t write code. Using the Proceedings of Federal Parliament as our example, we’ll explore what becomes possible once a collection is searchable and structured: tracing how language shifts across parliaments and decades, reading individual speeches in context, and comparing how different speakers and periods treat the same issue.
Bring your laptop and work along with us. No coding experience needed.