Welcome to HELDIG Forum on Tuesday 1.10.2019 at 10:15 with a talk by Dr. Vilja Hulden from the Department of History, University of Colorado Boulder.

Abstract

This talk reports on a project that conducts a computational analysis of the metadata on hearings before the U.S. Congress to understand long-term patterns in whose voices have been represented at such hearings. Congressional hearings, held both to gather testimony and views on legislative proposals and to investigate particularly burning societal problems, form an important body of evidence in many works of history and political science. As a subject in its own right, however, testifying before Congress is relatively little studied. Yet, as the most accessible form of (federal) lobbying, Congressional hearings offer a unique window into the functioning of American democracy, and computational analysis and text mining can help us make sense of long-term trends and broad patterns in this data set of some 70,000 hearings with nearly a million instances of testimony. How have topics of concern as well as the prominence of particular groups of witnesses shifted over time? Who has had the ear of the national legislature as it has deliberated on the laws that govern our common public life? And what does it take to gain representation at hearings?

HELDIG Forum sessions are open and free for everybody to join. These meetings are educational and dissemination activities targeted especially for researchers and teachers willing employ digital methods more in their work. Welcome!

Coffee is served at 10:00-11:00 at Metsätalo, Unioninkatu 40. See the programme details and the registration form below – please register so that we can order the right amount of coffee:
http://heldig.fi/forum