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Pollux Newsletter #11

December 17, 2024

"Tea is drunk to forget the din of the world."

T'ien Yiheng (16th century)

News from Pollux

Searching 72 years of parliamentary discourse with Pollux Political Corpora (PoliCorp)

Pollux offers researchers an easy way to search and analyze political text collections (corpora) on a new experimental platform Pollux Political Corpora (PoliCorp).

PoliCorp provides researchers with access to rich textual data, enabling in-depth analysis of parliamentary discourse over time.

A demo version is available here.

PoliCorp currently contains data from the GermaParl corpus, a collection of transcripts of Bundestag debates, spanning 72 years of parliamentary debates - from 1949 to 2021 - and comprises over 958,000 speech contributions.

PoliCorp is designed to cater to the needs of researchers in political science and related disciplines. The user-friendly web interface facilitates efficient and straightforward data searching. The current version of the platform allows researchers to perform keyword-based searches within the corpus. Several search fields can be combined and logical filters can be used to uncover patterns and correlations. Researchers can download selected subcorpora free of charge in JSON format and use them for further analysis. Future enhancements will include advanced search capabilities (i.e. search by synonyms, topics, etc.) and integrated data analytics functionalities.

We look forward to receiving feedback at nina.smirnova@gesis.org

Open Science

Open Social Sciences - SOCIOS online

SOCIOS is now officially online:

Visit SOCIOS

The University and City Library of Cologne has developed a new platform for open peer review in the social sciences in cooperation with Pollux and the specialised information services for sociology, criminology and ethnology.

On SOCIOS, researchers can share their research results quickly and openly as a preprint and obtain direct feedback from qualified peers. In the spirit of open peer review, the entire review process is transparent and public alongside the articles, which strengthens the scientific discourse. Another advantage for researchers: Peer reviews also receive a DOI, making them citable. This makes them visible as an independent scientific achievement and increases their recognition in the academic environment.

transcript Open Library Political Science

The "transcript Open Library Political Science" could again be realized for the year 2025 through crowdfunding. 56 institutions from Germany, Austria and Switzerland participated in financing the open access position of 17 new publications in the field of political science. The FID Political Science - Pollux is again the main sponsor in 2025. The entire “Open Library Political Science” now comprises 288 titles with a total of over 3.8 million uses.

Verfassungsblog - Diamond Open Access

Pollux is once again contributing to the funding for the Verfassungsblog in 2025. The Verfassungsblog publishes analyses by academics on current topics in constitutional law and politics. Founded in 2009 as a “blog”, over 3,000 experts from all over the world have now published and discussed on the Verfassungsblog and made their research available to their colleagues and the general public. The texts are published Diamond OA - i.e. without fees for readers or authors - under a CC-BY-SA license.