1. médialab Sciences Po
  2. News
  3. Opening up parliamentary debates with Open Parliament TV

Opening up parliamentary debates with Open Parliament TV

Joscha Jäger will present the current prototype of “Open Parliament TV” with German Bundestag data as a use case and discuss the open source architecture needed to integrate additional parliaments in the future.

Event, Research Seminar

Abstract

"Videos of plenary speeches are the “spectacular” parts of politics, which find their way into newsrooms, social media feeds and Late Night Shows. Almost every parliament publishes such video recordings, along with text-based transcripts or protocols. But despite comparable structures and similar workflows, parliamentary proceedings are published in various non-interoperable formats and the parliament tv infrastructures are not accessible beyond the boundaries of specific platforms. Additionally, the way these contents are currently published is largely based upon sharing short video clips, with a clear lack of contextual information (full speech, relevant original documents, additional materials, other speeches on the same subject, etc.). So as soon as the speeches are used for in-depth analyses, fact checks, learning or longform reporting, we rely solely on the text-based transcripts and quotes.

With “Open Parliament TV”, we aim to build the workflows, tools and user interfaces required to facilitate new ways of experiencing political speeches. We want to enrich the video recordings with time-based transcripts (click on a sentence → point of time in the video), context-related annotations (display relevant documents at certain points of time) and means of participation (discuss, cite and share specific video segments). Our goal is to fundamentally change the way people interact with video-based publications of parliamentary debates. It is based on existing approaches in several countries, with a focus on generic open source solutions, which can be integrated in different jurisdictions, languages, countries, parliamentary systems and technological environments. Instead of aiming for maximum exactness of an automated process or dealing with specific peculiarities of one parliamentary administration, we focus on the broad applicability and reusability of the developed components. 

In this talk we will present our current prototype of “Open Parliament TV” with German Bundestag data as a use case and discuss the open source architecture needed to integrate additional parliaments in the future."

Resumé

Joscha Jäger (see also @OpenHypervideo) is a creative technologist and researcher, working for more than 10 years in the realm of web-native hypervideo formats, time-based interaction concepts and video search interfaces. He has a strong focus on film as information architecture, collaborative video editing systems and user-driven annotation systems. In the last years, he was involved in several large scale research efforts towards the preservation and digital accessibility of audiovisual archives, as well as future film production and distribution cycles based on linked open data and semantic web technologies.

He co-organized the “Workshop on Interactive Content Consumption” (WSICC) at ACM TVX for three years, served as a mentor at the “Popathon” HackJams for web-native storytelling and is continuously developing the “FrameTrail” Open Hypervideo Environment.

Since 2019 he works as project lead for “Open Parliament TV”.