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clarin-eric / ParlaMint

ParlaMint: Comparable Parliamentary Corpora
https://clarin-eric.github.io/ParlaMint/
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NO: bi- and uni-cameralism, again #687

Open TomazErjavec opened 1 year ago

TomazErjavec commented 1 year ago

@tungland, in preparing the the release and modifying some scripts I noticed the situation where you distinguish meetings of the lower, upper, and unicameral "houses", which has some problems.

First, I am aware of the discussion on this topic in https://github.com/clarin-eric/ParlaMint/issues/513#issuecomment-1383167924 and https://github.com/clarin-eric/ParlaMint/issues/473#issuecomment-1354946806 but am still not happy with the current solution. There is not great rush to solve this, we can do it for 3.1, and, even if you don't want to re-process your corpus, I think any change could be done automatically. I would value your and @matyaskopp's feedback though.

So, what I find bothersome:

  1. In the description of NO you write "During this period (i.e. pre-2009) the transcripts are divided into categories of “lower”, “upper” and “joint”." However, in the actual files you don't have "joint", but "unicameral", e.g. for ParlaMint-NO_1998-10-20: <meeting ana="#parla.uni #parla.sitting" corresp="#ST" n="1998-10-20">Sitting day 1998-10-20</meeting>
  2. Writing either "joint" or "unicameral" for these joint meetings seems strange to me, I would rather expect here to have references to both lower and upper house, e.g. <meeting ana="#parla.upper #parla.lower #parla.sitting" corresp="#ST" n="1998-10-20">Sitting day 1998-10-20</meeting>
  3. There are lower, upper or joint meetings that happen on the same day, and they are distinguished by your flenames (and, of course meeting/@ana), but not in the main title of the meeting, so several files / components can have the same title. However, we have the rule that each corpus component should have a unique title.

Given your comments that "Constitutionally there never were such things as upper and lower houses in Norway", "most meetings took place with the joint assembly", "it could make more sense to remove the extra "lower house" and "upper house" transcripts as from what I have seen they are not very valuable" I would propose that we re-classify NO as unicameral system (even before 2009), so all the meetings have #parla.uni but, we extend the titles of pre-2009 meetings to say if this is a meeting of Odelsting or Lagting (and whatever the translation to English would be) or a join meeting of the two. The filenames (and IDs) could stay the same.

So, what do you think?

tungland commented 1 year ago

@TomazErjavec seems sane to me

If I understand correctly the changes you propose are the following:

  1. Change designation to unicameral for whole corpus
  2. Add reference to the participating "houses" in all files in stead of "joint". I suppose after 2009 we just have #parla.uni, correct?
  3. Add some sort suffix to the sub meetings of the house. Odelsting and Lagting are not translated to anything else.

Does that sum it up? What is the timeframe for 3.1?

TomazErjavec commented 1 year ago

I'm sorry, @tungland, this issue somehow escaped me. I'm not not sure what the status re above is with NO. Maybe you can clarify but in any case, this now goes to the Future milestone.