In late 2017, a unique crowdsourcing platform was born. The Hellenic Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Team represents the first scientific crowdsourcing initiative that aims exclusively at the processing and study of parliamentary textual data. It builds on the plain idea that a decentralized group of people can be more than the mere sum of individuals.

Our team members are virtually linked through an online exchange platform and gather regularly for monthly meetings, where problems are discussed and best practices are exchanged. Newcomers receive basic training on entering the group, while more experienced members, called ‘mentors’, provide peer-to-peer advice and support. Text processing follows a well-defined streamlined process, which is developed in order to build quality corpora of parliamentary relevance. The resulting content is brought in an open and structured format, such as XML (eXtensible Markup Language), and enables the use of novel tools and methods from the exciting field of computational linguistics.

The opportunities that arise from the study of the aforementioned corpora are tremendous, as they allow for interlinking of several – formerly distant – areas of research, such as history, political science and linguistics, thus opening up new horizons in the understanding of parliamentary data and discourse. The Hellenic OCR Team is rapidly expanding and we are looking for interested individuals to further enhance our dynamic interdisciplinary team.