Spoken Political Discourse as Represented in the Hansard Proceedings

Spoken political discourse in the UK Houses of Parliament is recorded and transcribed through the Hansard proceedings. This method of transcription and representation captures the oral debates during the weekly parliamentary sessions of Prime Minister’s questions. This paper looks at three areas of representation to see how faithfully the spoken discourse is recorded. These areas are: lexical and grammatical fidelity, performance characteristics and interruptions from the audience. The paper also considers how speakers in the House quote from Hansard and how accurate these quotes are to the originals. The findings suggest that overall Hansard is a fairly robust method for representation of spoken political discourse but that modern transcription and digital methods could be employed to augment the system. We argue that a more representational system that uses a multi-tool approach should be employed.