ParlRulesData.org is a machine‐readable dataset of House of Commons Standing Orders between 1811 and 2015. The data currently covers the UK House of Commons (1811-2015) and the Irish Dáil (1926-2016). They chart procedural changes and are described in this article which gives insight into their creation and how they can be used by researchers.
Social Sciences and Humanities Librarians’ Blog
Expansion of GovInfo (US government)
For those seeking full-text US government documents Govinfo has now added more than 1500 Congressional Hearings since 2008. There are also selected committees from 1957 onwards. They include oversight of legislation and investigations. This tutorial explains the role of the legislative process.
United Nations Hand Book 2019 launched
Get useful facts and figures on the working of the UN from this annual publication from the government of New Zealand. It focuses on the structure membership and role of the about the six principal UN organs established by the UN Charter: the General Assembly, Security Council, Economic and Social Council, Trusteeship Council, International Court […]
Find out more about Impeachment
Background information on the nature of the impeachment process in the USA and how it has been used in the past. An excellent respected source are the EveryCRS reports which contain Congressional Research reports prepared to inform members of the Congress. All can be downloaded in full text.
What is the current state of the Internet?
Find out in the latest annual report on the global rate of connection from the ITU. This year’s theme is Broadband as Foundation for Sustainable Development. It considers issues on how to bring Africa online and the global digital gap. A new report by the Collaboration for International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA), considers […]
China 70th anniversary of Communist rule
The official website in China has an English language section which discusses the anniversary Official news coverage News coverage BBC Guardian newspaper CNN graphics Wall Street Journal Analysis World Bank data and reports on Chinese economic growth Brookings Institution RUSI China Council on Foreign Relations Carnegie Endowment Chatham House Human rights analysis Amnesty International Human Rights […]
The Total Digital Access to the League of Nations Archives Project (LONTAD)
The ultimate aim of this exciting project is to create a digital archive of the League of Nations (1920-1946), the predecessor of the United Nations. The LONTAD project is made possible through a generous donation of a private Swiss foundation. It is giving updates on the progress of the project and highlights of what is […]
Do hate speech detectors discriminate against African Americans?
Shocking article on arXiv.org from the at the Annual Meeting for the Association for Computational Linguistics 2019. It reports that the algorithms used by “sophisticated” hate bias checkers are not neutral – they are based on standard American English. Therefore tweets by black Americans are proportionally more likely to be flagged up as abusive than […]
UK General Election data from 1918-2017
A House of Commons Library briefing containing constituency level data from 1918. This can be downloaded as either an excel or CSV file. Also includes votes by party, vote share and voter turnout levels. There is a user guide to the original sources.
Communication in Emergencies Research
A new site compiled by independent charity BBC Media Action. It gathers together BBC research and case studies (including clips and examples) which examine the role of the media in crisis communication. It gives examples of actual campaigns and guidelines on good practice. At present there are 6 specific case studies on the website: Syria, Gaza, Ebola, […]
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