The GermaParl R Data Package

About

GermaParl is a R data package that includes:

A small subset of the linguistically annotated and CWB-indexed GermaParl corpus of plenary protocols of the German Bundestag by default;
Functionality to load the the full CWB version of GermaParl from the Open Science repository Zenodo, and
Additional functionality to work with topic models.

The companion GitHub repository GermaParlTEI offers the TEI-XML versions of the corpus. The GermaParl data package is designed to provide easy access to a linguistically annotated and indexed version of the data.

More specifically, GermaParl has been imported into the Corpus Workbench (CWB). Using the CWB keeps the data size modest, ensures performance, exposes the syntax of the Corpus Query Processor (CQP), and generates opportunites to combine quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyzing text.

The GermaParl package is designed to be used with polmineR as a toolset for various standard qualitative and quantitative tasks in text analysis (count, dispersion, ngrams, cooccurrences, viewing concordances as well as going back to the original full-text). Using polmineR, you can easily generate data structures (such as term-document matrices) that are required as input for advanced statistical procedures.

Installation

CRAN Release

The GermaParl package can be installed from CRAN:

install.packages("GermaParl")

Development Version

The development version of the GermaParl package may include consolidated or new functionality, and improved documentation. To install the development version of GermaParl package from GitHub, proceed as follows.

if (!"devtools" %in% rownames(available.packages())) install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("PolMine/GermaParl", ref = "dev")

Please note that on Windows systems, it may be necessary to install Rtools to be able to use the full functionality of the devtools package.

Download and install the GermaParl corpus

After the initial installation, the package only includes a small subset of the GermaParl corpus (“GERMAPARLMINI”). The subset serves as sample data and is used for running package tests. To download the full corpus, use a function to download the full corpus from the Open Science repository Zenodo:

library(GermaParl)
germaparl_download_corpus()

Note that the corpus will be installed in the system corpus directory by default. If the required directory structure is not available, a dialogue will guide the user through creating the registry directory and the corpus directory. If you want to download the corpus into the R package, you might use the following code.

germaparl_download_corpus(
  registry_dir = system.file(package = "GermaParl", "extdata", "cwb", "registry"),
  corpus_dir = system.file(package = "GermaParl", "extdata", "cwb", "indexed_corpora")
)

To avoid bloating the data that needs to be downloaded - it is somewhat large already -, further annotation can be generated on demand. See the package documentation to learn about the functionality that is available.

Using GermaParl

The CWB indexed version of GermaParl can be used with any tool for working with CWB indexed corpora (such as CQP or CQPweb). The GermaParl R package is optimized to work with the polmineR R package. See the documentation for instructions how to install polmineR.

To check whether the installation has been successful, run the following commands. For further instructions, see the documentation of polmineR.

library(polmineR)
use("GermaParl") # only necessary if you have downloaded the corpus into GermaParl package
corpus() # to see whether the GERMAPARL corpus is listed
size("GERMAPARL") # to learn about the size of the corpus

Digging Deeper - Open Educational Resources (OER)

Using Corpora in Social Science Research (UCSSR)

The “UCSSR” (Using Corpora in Social Science Research) series of online slides make extensive use of GermaParl and introduce some analytical approaches to parliamentary debates.

Video Tutorials for GermaParl

Christoph Nguyen has crafted video tutorials on GermaParl available at YouTube for a class on Parliamentary Analysis in R. Four tutorials give a hands-on introduction to analysing GermaParl in combination with the polmineR package.

Click on the lessons to watch Christoph’s tutorials (in German)!

License

The GermaParl R package uses the GPL-3 license as a standard license for open source software. The license of the GermaParl corpus is the Creative Commons Attibution ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC BY-SA 4.0). That means:

BY - Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

SA - ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

See the CC Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License for further explanations.

Quoting GermaParl

The ‘GermaParl’ R package and the ‘GermaParl’ corpus are two different pieces of research data, with different version numbers, document object identifiers (DOIs) and recommendations for quotation. If you use GermaParl for your research, maximum transparency on the tools you used is attained, when both the package and the corpus is quoted in your publication. To ensure the reproducibility of your research, it is more important to refer to and specify the corpus (including version, DOI) you used.

Blaette, Andreas (2020): GermaParl. Download and Augment the Corpus of Plenary Protocols of the German Bundestag. R package version 1.4.1. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=GermaParl

Blaette, Andreas (2020): GermaParl. Linguistically Annotated and Indexed Corpus of Plenary Protocols of the German Bundestag. CWB corpus version 1.0.6. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3735141

NOTE: In an R session, you can get this recommendation how to quote GermaParl by calling the usual citation() function:

citation("GermaParl")

Feedback

We hope that GermaParl (and polmineR) will inspire your research and make it more productive. We would be glad to learn what you do with the data, and make your blog entries or publications visible here.

And please do not forget to bring issues that you come across to our attention. We cordially invite you to use the GitHub issues of this package to report bugs, shortcomings and to suggest enhancements. Improving data quality is an important concern of the PolMine Project, this is why the data is versioned. The resource will benefit from its community of users and your feedback!

PolMine / GermaParl

readme