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Talk Beginner First Talk

Let us make accessible Political Archives on the internet: The Constitution, Parliament and News Reporting on Hate

Approved
Session Description

The state assemblies, the parliament and political rallies are difficult-to-fully-grasp happenings that deserve deeper engagement – not through social media, dramaticised news or other dumbed-down channels. In diverse ways, a lack of accessible transparency, censorship and disinformation are enabled by the media landscape of today. The current political atmosphere underlines why we must create Political Archives that enable easier access to the mundane and extreme happenings in the politics of the nation. The Constitutional Observer and the Where does Hate Live? (WdHL) Explorer are projects that provide access to archives: Parliamentry debates across time, and news media reportage on hate and hate-enabling political activity

The Constitutional Observer presents an accessible way to search the Lok Sabha debate archives with the context of the Constituent Assembly debates: through questions that one might have in natural language. Over 2000 days of Lok Sabha proceedings PDFs from 1986 were parsed and made queriable with an embedding enabled semantic search. With the WdHL explorer, news articles and media collected/aggregated by Hindutva Watch and Alt News have been archived, and geolocated.

This talk will be about my 3 year journey with these projects, what prompted these outcomes with my learnings of the political landscape and the considerations involved at various levels: Conception, design, learning-to-make, technology considerations and making-to-share. This is also an invite to come together to make these archives in other languages, for other legislatures, and make archives of these times. This means working with bringing together a pan-india archive of state legislature activity, translation and sharing in standard formats. It also means bringing together a group of people to review the archive of WdHL, to keep the project running.

Key Takeaways

- Essential ways / needs to enable access to parliamentary debates across states and the Lok Sabha

- Mishmashing technology and learning along the way to build

- Early thoughts on Archives beyond the digital and enabling wider engagement with the archives beyond journalism or research

- A brief look into how different governments are handling documentation of debates, and guiding enquires on archiving and locating news reports thematically

References

https://constitutional.observer/about
https://where-does-hate-live.netlify.app/about

Session Categories

Knowledge Commons (Open Hardware, Open Science, Open Data etc.)
Which track are you applying for?
Open Data Devroom

Speakers

Adhavan Mohana Sivaraj
Jr Fellow, Research and Development Aruvu Collaboratory
https://adhavansivaraj.xyz
Adhavan Mohana Sivaraj

My work engages with textual and geospatial ‘data’ for public-spirited needs. This may take the form of archiving, designing digital interactions with the archives and developing data-methods to make these archives. My engagements with the urban through SafeYelli have largely driven my geospatial and civic research interests. My work with Aruvu is with communities and places in Kundapura, Bidar and Channapatna.

Reviews

+1. Good submission. Call-to-action to the devroom fits quite well.

Suggestion: The title has some scope of improvement.

Reviewer #1 Approved

I think it's a good use case of using LLMs to make open data accessible. Ties in with theme of making open data accessible

Reviewer #2 Approved
Reviewer #3 Approved