Οpen Parliamentary Data as a Tool for Linguistic Research: Exploring the ‘Greek Language Question’ in the Journal of Parliamentary Debates

Parliamentary Libraries currently face the challenge of shifting from being gate-keepers of a Parliament’s archival and contemporary “treasures” to functioning as dynamic information and knowledge hubs, through the production, management and availability of open diachronic and synchronic data; in this light, this paper presents the Hellenic Parliament Library experience, focusing on a subcategory of historical parliamentary data, included in the Hellenic Parliament Library Repository under construction. In the first part, more technically-oriented, an outline of the text detection and recognition process is provided, in order to render the materials in question machine-readable, while in the second part the potential for linguistic research is highlighted, through a case-study exploring aspects of the ‘Greek language question’, as discussed in the parliamentary context, within the wider framework of language policy making.