Background

A basic script to generate a tsv corpus of contributions from a particular member of oireachtas.

This approach searches debates by the member URI provided (for example, Enda-Kenny.D.1975-11-12), with the number of matches limited to the number provided (for example, 5000). This response contains debate records by section - excellent.

However, the XML files linked out to within the debate sections seem to be dead. Luckily, for each contribution we are also given a link out to the XML file for the entire day's debate (for example, https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2015-11-03/debate/mul@/main.xml).

So we build a list of unique XML files for all the days our wonderful member made contributions.

Within each of these XML files, we have enough information to glean the date, house code (for example, dail), house number (for example, 32 - the 32nd sitting of the Dáil), debate section topic (for example, 'Brexit Issues'), debate section id (for example, dbsect_37), contribution itself (we search for speech tags with the attribute by='#EndaKenny', or whatever our member's pId is), and the order of this contribution in the day's discourse (for example, spk_272 - the 272nd individual contribution of the day's debates).

Usage

We need to pass memberUri, limit, and pId as arguments to the script.

python generate.py 'Enda-Kenny.D.1975-11-12' '#EndaKenny' 'Enda Kenny' '1951-04-21' 'Fine Gael' 'Mayo' 5000

Note that the memberUri and pId can be found by hitting the members endpoint for our desired oireachtas member over at https://api.oireachtas.ie/.

Analysis

• File size x-large generated based on limit10000

• File size large generated based on limit3000

• File size medium generated based on limit1000

• File size small trimmed medium to first thousand lines in txt file. This has 732575 characters. We normalise to 730000.

• We produce formal-articles.txt to have a similar character count of 744033, but we normalise to 730000.

• We produce social-comments.txt using Selenium to dynamically load comment section. It has 2298241, but we normalise to 730000.

• This gives us 3 corpora of virtually equal size.