Parliament / en 老司机直播 team brings Hansard, one of Canada鈥檚 most important documents, into the digital age /news/u-t-team-brings-hansard-one-canada-s-most-important-documents-digital-age <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">老司机直播 team brings Hansard, one of Canada鈥檚 most important documents, into the digital age</span> <div class="field field--name-field-featured-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field__item"> <img loading="eager" srcset="/sites/default/files/styles/news_banner_370/public/2018-07-24-canadian%20parliament-resized.jpg?h=afdc3185&amp;itok=Lw9vPLUI 370w, /sites/default/files/styles/news_banner_740/public/2018-07-24-canadian%20parliament-resized.jpg?h=afdc3185&amp;itok=m6KcPj_m 740w, /sites/default/files/styles/news_banner_1110/public/2018-07-24-canadian%20parliament-resized.jpg?h=afdc3185&amp;itok=7dy5ysDP 1110w" sizes="(min-width:1200px) 1110px, (max-width: 1199px) 80vw, (max-width: 767px) 90vw, (max-width: 575px) 95vw" width="740" height="494" src="/sites/default/files/styles/news_banner_370/public/2018-07-24-canadian%20parliament-resized.jpg?h=afdc3185&amp;itok=Lw9vPLUI" alt="Photo of Canadian Parliament"> </div> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>noreen.rasbach</span></span> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"><time datetime="2018-07-23T18:32:18-04:00" title="Monday, July 23, 2018 - 18:32" class="datetime">Mon, 07/23/2018 - 18:32</time> </span> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-field-cutline-long field--type-text-long field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">Cutline</div> <div class="field__item">Every word spoken in Canada鈥檚 parliamentary debates is transcribed, and has been since 1880 (photo by Shutterstock)</div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-author-reporters field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/authors-reporters/alexa-battler" hreflang="en">Alexa Battler</a></div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-topic field--type-entity-reference field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">Topic</div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/topics/city-culture" hreflang="en">City &amp; Culture</a></div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-story-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/computer-science" hreflang="en">Computer Science</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/humanities" hreflang="en">Humanities</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/parliament" hreflang="en">Parliament</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/political-science" hreflang="en">Political Science</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/research-innovation" hreflang="en">Research &amp; Innovation</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/u-t-scarborough" hreflang="en">老司机直播 Scarborough</a></div> </div> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>Since 1880, every word spoken in Canada鈥檚 parliamentary debates has been transcribed and recorded into a massive document called Hansard. To put the size and scale of Hansard in perspective, reading the entire document&nbsp;at a pace of about a novel a day would take 66 years.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>But this rich, historical document&nbsp;was becoming less usable every year because of its size 鈥 until a group of University of Toronto political scientists, computer scientists and historians decided to intervene.</p> <p>鈥淵ou have this really unrivalled historical resource that is accumulated over time, and by virtue of its size and magnitude, is impenetrable,鈥 says <strong>Christopher Cochrane</strong>, associate professor of political science at 老司机直播 Scarborough. 鈥淭hat is the status of Hansard prior to digitization.鈥</p> <p>In 2013, Cochrane teamed up with two&nbsp;postdoctoral researchers, two PhD students and <strong>Graeme Hirst</strong>, professor of computer science at 老司机直播 Scarborough, to create <a href="https://www.lipad.ca/">LiPaD: The Linked Parliamentary Data Project</a>.&nbsp;</p> <p>LiPaD has digitized and made searchable Canada鈥檚 parliamentary debates dating back to 1901. It also created and designed a website to make the documents more accessible to the public, a project headed by PhD student <strong>Tanya Whyte</strong>.</p> <p>鈥淢aking these data very clearly accessible, very clearly searchable and opening it to everybody basically takes something that was becoming of little use because of its size and makes its use as enormous,鈥 says Cochrane.</p> <p>With a click, users can also find more information on parliamentarians, such as their party affiliation and gender. The site is continually adding more information on members, including demographic profiles and election outcomes.</p> <p><img alt class="media-image attr__typeof__foaf:Image img__fid__8888 img__view_mode__media_large attr__format__media_large" height="453" src="/sites/default/files/2018-07-24-Chris_Cochrane-resized.jpg" typeof="foaf:Image" width="681" loading="lazy"></p> <p><em>Christopher Cochrane, associate professor of political science at 老司机直播 Scarborough, says LiPaD puts the usefulness of Canada's Hansard on par with its size (photo by Ken Jones)</em></p> <p>The process began with Canadiana, a non-profit heritage coalition, which scanned every page of the Hansard and posted them online. But as pictures instead of text, the documents could not be searched with keywords.</p> <p>The good news for the LiPaD team is they did not have to physically scan the documents, but there were other challenges.&nbsp;Many of the documents, some more than a century old, were physically damaged with specks, bits of dirt or smudges from printing. This made it hard for optical character recognition (OCR) programs, which convert written or printed words into text a computer can read, to correctly register the contents of the pages.</p> <p>The quality of the documents, particularly stray specks, made it difficult to read French words. OCR settings that allowed French accent marks would also confuse specks for accents. Meanwhile, OCR settings that read only English had trouble reading genuine French accent marks. LiPaD is currently only available for&nbsp;English proceedings, but Cochrane says the team is interested in eventually offering the French proceedings as well.</p> <p>The OCR would often err with English as well. Hirst says a common stumbling point was in the standard parliamentary phrase 鈥淗on. member,鈥 short for&nbsp; Honourable member. If the 鈥淗鈥 was even slightly obscured or broken, the computer would misread the term as 鈥渓ion member.鈥</p> <p>鈥淭hat鈥檚 an easy one to fix, because obviously we would expect there to be zero occurrences of 鈥榣ion member,鈥欌 Hirst says. 鈥淏ut it illustrates the kind of low quality that we were up against all over the place, including ones that weren鈥檛 so easy to fix.鈥</p> <p>To remedy this, <strong>Kaspar Beelen</strong>, now an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, created several rules, allowing the computer to recognize common mistakes and giving it instructions to fix them.</p> <p>The massive amount of publicly accessible data, which can be downloaded in multiple formats, is&nbsp;a powerful tool for future work.</p> <p>鈥淚f you present the world with an interesting data set, people will find ways to use it that you yourself never thought of,鈥 Hirst says. 鈥淚 hope that there are people out there doing that with LiPaD right now.鈥</p> <p><strong>Ludovic Rheault</strong>, now an assistant professor of politicial science at 老司机直播, joined the project in 2014 and began conducting applied research projects using the data from LiPaD. In one paper, published in 2016, he used the data to study how the language parliamentarians use in debates can indicate anxiety levels.</p> <p>Rheault says the intersection of computer science, political science and language represents the most appealing thing he found about LiPaD 鈥 the opportunity to work with an interdisciplinary team.</p> <p>鈥淭o grow as a citizen and a researcher, having the ability to look at what people do in other disciplines often times makes you realize that, 鈥極h, I was completely blind or oblivious to this solution or a particular problem,鈥欌 he says. 鈥淚t helps you change the way you see problem-solving in general.鈥</p> <p>The project has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and the Digging into Data initiative.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-news-home-page-banner field--type-boolean field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">News home page banner</div> <div class="field__item">Off</div> </div> Mon, 23 Jul 2018 22:32:18 +0000 noreen.rasbach 139346 at Election 2015: what happens if nobody wins a clear majority? /news/election-2015-what-happens-if-nobody-wins-clear-majority <span class="field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hidden">Election 2015: what happens if nobody wins a clear majority? </span> <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>sgupta</span></span> <span class="field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hidden"><time datetime="2015-10-13T06:41:44-04:00" title="Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - 06:41" class="datetime">Tue, 10/13/2015 - 06:41</time> </span> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-field-cutline-long field--type-text-long field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">Cutline</div> <div class="field__item">(photo by A Yee via flickr)</div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-author-reporters field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/authors-reporters/alan-christie" hreflang="en">Alan Christie</a></div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-author-legacy field--type-string field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">Author legacy</div> <div class="field__item">Alan Christie</div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-story-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/top-stories" hreflang="en">Top Stories</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/politics" hreflang="en">Politics</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/parliament" hreflang="en">Parliament</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/government" hreflang="en">Government</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/faculty-arts-science" hreflang="en">Faculty of Arts &amp; Science</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/election-2015" hreflang="en">Election 2015</a></div> <div class="field__item"><a href="/news/tags/election" hreflang="en">Election</a></div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-subheadline field--type-string-long field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">Subheadline</div> <div class="field__item">Professor Peter Loewen delivers a democratic primer</div> </div> <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>With public opinion polls pointing to a possible minority government after the federal election, Professor <strong>Peter Loewen</strong> has outlined&nbsp;some of the scenarios that could follow, and the role of the Governor General.</p> <p>In the weeks leading up to the election,&nbsp;<em>老司机直播 News</em> has been asking experts from across the university for their analysis of the major issues, the debates, political advertising and public opinion polling and more.&nbsp;Recent features have shared campaign analysis in statistics, economics, marketing, law and other disciplines.</p> <h2><a href="http://news.utoronto.ca/tags/election">Read more Election 2015 coverage</a></h2> <p>Loewen, an&nbsp;associate professor of political science, spoke with writer <strong>Alan Christie</strong> about the election and the procedures followed after all the&nbsp;votes are cast.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Will more people vote in this election, given the apparent mood for change and the well-publicized campaign to get young people to cast ballots on Oct. 19?&nbsp;</strong><br> If I had to hazard an estimate, I鈥檇 say that turnout will be within two points of where it was last time, either above or below. (In the federal election of 2011, 61.1 per cent of eligible voters cast ballots).&nbsp;</p> <p>It鈥檚 very hard to get young people to vote, so I don鈥檛 think we should expect a large change (about one-third of those 18-24 voted in 2011). &nbsp;</p> <p><strong>There are 338 seats up for grabs in this election up from 308 in the last House of Commons. Does redistribution favour the governing party? Has it addressed some of the inequities with regard to rural ridings and urban ridings?</strong><br> With the exception of one seat in Quebec, the remainder of seats have been added to largely suburban ridings in Ontario, Alberta, and B.C. This is probably to the advantage of the Conservative Party, on balance. That said, this has not done much to address the very large disparity in populations between rural and urban ridings.</p> <p>It is important for Canadians to know that our riding populations vary by a very large amount. Constituency populations vary by as much as 25 per cent above or below the average constituency population in a respective province. In practical terms, this means that some constituencies in a province might have 125,000 voters while another has 75,000. This really affects voting power, and it is not really addressed by these reforms.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>What happens if no party gets a majority </strong><span style="color: rgb(84, 84, 84); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: 18.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">鈥&nbsp;</span><strong>170 seats? What is the process used to form a new government? Can you explain the role of the Governor General in this process?</strong><br> This is actually not an entirely clear answer to this, but the basic set of moves is the following. The Prime Minister has the first opportunity to try to form a government, regardless of whether he has won the most seats or not. That said, Prime Minister Harper has indicated that if he is not leading the seat count then he will not attempt to form a government. If he is first, he will attempt to pass a Speech from the Throne. This will be put to a vote by the House of Commons.</p> <p>The opposition parties can respond in several ways. They can let the Speech pass. At that point, Harper is largely in the clear. Second, they can vote the Speech down. If they do this, they have three broad options.</p> <p>First, they can form a coalition in which they would share cabinet seats and jointly govern.</p> <p>Second, one of those parties <span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">鈥&nbsp;</span>likely the&nbsp;one with the most seats 鈥 can form the government with support from the other according to a formal agreement. Such an agreement would spell out which policies the government would pass.&nbsp;</p> <p>Third, one of the parties can attempt to govern with case-by-case support from one of the opposition parties. As for the Governor General, I think his role is less clear than political scientists and constitutional experts like to pretend. In short, his job is to judge whether a government has sufficient support to govern, and if not, to identify which party or parties might be able to govern. How he decides to do this and when he will do it after the election is largely at his discretion.</p> <p>If the Tories can pass a Throne Speech then they have a case for an election if they are later defeated. But if the Throne Speech fails, then the Governor General will assess whether an alternative formation has a chance of&nbsp;succeeding.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>There have been quite a few minority governments in Canadian history, including ones led by Stephen Harper, Paul Martin, Pierre Trudeau, Lester Pearson and John Diefenbaker. How effective can they be?</strong><br> I think the evidence is that a lot can be done. We should not be worried about minority governments. In general terms, I think we have a very robust political system. It can survive whatever government form or Prime Minister&nbsp;emerges.&nbsp;</p> <div><strong>If the Conservatives win the most seats but not a majority and are toppled in a confidence vote by the opposition parties, what changes do you see happening with a new Liberal or NDP government? &nbsp;</strong></div> <div>This is a good question. I think that the untold story in this election is that passing laws takes time. A new government will have to decide how much time they will devote to reversing laws that they oppose and to proposing new laws or programs that they support. This is, in my mind, an open question.</div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-news-home-page-banner field--type-boolean field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">News home page banner</div> <div class="field__item">Off</div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-picpath field--type-string field--label-above"> <div class="field__label">picpath</div> <div class="field__item">sites/default/files/2015-10-13-Election2015-Primer.jpg</div> </div> Tue, 13 Oct 2015 10:41:44 +0000 sgupta 7345 at