Exploring Dáil data

Visualising what was being talked about, and by who

Explore content from Dáil transcripts, published on GitHub by KildareStreet.com. This visualisation shows who talked about what between 17^th January, 2014 and 17^th July, 2014. Any errors or omissions are unintentional; technical details on how this was produced are below.

You can explore by double clicking the circles.

Circle size indicates the number of times an entity (such as a person, organisation, location) was mentioned. Arrows indicate the direction of the mention, i.e. who mentioned who/what.

About the visualisation

Some technical details

I published a blog post with some further details on the project's development.

The data was extracted from a selection of XML files using Natural Language Processing Entity Extraction (Python NLTK). Files covered the time-period between the 17^th of January, 2014 and the 17^th of July, 2014.

Each passage of speech in the files was analysed, with the objective of recognising and retrieving "named entities", such as people, organisations, locations, etc. These were then linked with the relevant speaker.

This started primarily as an experiment in using NLP (and Python). As this is experimental, there may be unintentional errors or omissions in the data used.