OPaL - The Open Parliament Laboratory
Foto: Anders Löwdin/Sveriges riksdag
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In the last decades, methodological and technological development has led to great progress in Big-data research i.e. systematic analyses of large databases. At the same time, extensive efforts to digitalize physical archives has made new materials available for research within a breadth of research areas. Despite these new opportunities, awareness of and skills to conduct big-data analyses are generally scarce, not least within the humanities and social sciences.
OPaL is a research environment focused on creating a research infrastructure for supporting the use and analysis of big-data. One foundation of the research environment is the open data archive of the Swedish parliament, a unique digitalized archive that covers close to 500 years of parliamentary affairs. Within OPaL a search engine as well as analytical tools are developed for research on parliamentary open data within the social sciences and humanities.
Research projects
Active projects
- A complete dataset of roll-call votes in the Swedish parliament, 1925-1993
- Decoding Education Policy: Computational Methods for Education Policy Research
- Decoding the marketization of education in Sweden through computational analyses
- Setting the Agenda in the Swedish Riksdag: Partisan Politics and Commissions of Inquiry, 1971-2021.
Completed projects
Riksdagssök
The Swedish Parliament makes its activities accessible to the public through open data (data.riksdagen.se), offering a structured and extensive archive of both current and historical parliamentary work. However, the sheer volume of data, consisting of all parliamentary protocols and documents, makes the database difficult to survey and analyse. The OPaL research group has therefore developed a user-friendly interface for searching, filtering, exporting and analysing data from the Swedish Parliament, called Riksdagssök (riksdagsdata.oru.se).
Riksdagssök is a tool that enables advanced searches in the Swedish Parliament's open data and the Royal Library's database of historical data from the Swedish Parliament. Riksdagssök also makes it possible to export data in different formats and to perform simple analyses of this data (for example, to examine how often representatives of different political parties use specific words or expressions in parliamentary debates).