Processing Large-Scale Archival Records: The Case of the Swiss Parliamentary Records
Abstract
Legislative bodies generally keep records of their activities. While the digitization wave spurred the availability of archival documents, their processing remains a challenge. The Swiss parliamentary records are no exception. In this paper we present a supervised pipeline for extracting and structuring of content of archival records. Our pipeline consists of five steps, starting with an assessment of which elements need extraction and how they relate to each other. Step two involves general pre-processing to prepare the PDF documents and is followed by an element classification step. Step four involves post-processing and the final step is a validation of the extracted information. With our supervised approach, we are able to process over 200,000 pages of Swiss parliamentary records (spanning the years 1891-1995), a feat that would exceed the budget of most projects using manual curation. We discuss validation of individual steps and offer guidance to researchers engaged in similar data processing efforts. Show more
Permanent link
https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000666852Publication status
publishedExternal links
Journal / series
Swiss Political Science ReviewPublisher
WileySubject
archival records; parliamentary proceedings; Swiss parliament; text processing; text-to-dataFunding
184963 - Analyzing Co-Sponsorship Networks from 127 Years of the Swiss Federal Assembly (SNF)
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