1This digital textbook aims to provide a step-by-step introduction to using parliamentary proceedings as a datasource fit for multidisciplinary research questions. To this end, it specifically uses the ParlaMint corpora – a cluster of 29 corpora containing records of plenary sessions from European parliaments spanning at least the years of 2015 and early 2022. The great advantage of ParlaMint lies in its careful design which allows to respect national particularities while ensuring comparability between single parliaments through a common timeframe and a broad set of shared metadata categories as well as through an addition of machine-translated proceedings to English on top of the original transcripts. This makes ParlaMint not only relevant for individual studies into parliamentary discourse and activity, but also extensively useful for comparable studies that are of growing importance in our interlinked world plagued ever more with hostile political polarisation, populist movements and a loss of shared vision for the future.

2The digital textbook is specifically targeted at SSH researchers unfamiliar with using computer-assisted discourse analysis and corpus linguistic methods. While the sheer amount of data in ParlaMint and the methods presented in this digital textbook require the use of a computer, no special technical competences are required to follow the digital textbook. All data and tools are open access and can be used free of charge. Specifically, the digital textbook covers the contents and use of the ParlaMint corpora in the noSketch Engine and TEITOK tools.

3The digital textbook is divided into two parts. The first, theoretical part (Part I) introduces the main challenges of working with parliamentary data to equip the user with key information that fosters a critical understanding of the results. It also provides detailed information on ParlaMint corpora. While the sections on parliamentary discourse (Part I) and corpus-linguistic methods (Part II) are more broadly applicable, the digital textbook devotes substantial attention to explaining the structure and contents of ParlaMint corpora. This focus reflects both the uniqueness of the resource – designed to support multidisciplinary approaches – and the central concern in data reuse: the necessity of thoroughly understanding the corpus to use it appropriately.

4The second, practical part (Part II) illustrates the potential and issues related to specific research methods through two concrete examples of use. These are used to showcase the application of main corpuslinguistic methods coupled with discourse analysis to answer concrete research questions. With its broad set of languages and a machine-translated version of the proceedings to English, ParlaMint provides a unique resource to boost the presence of less-represented languages and enables large-scale comparative research. This dual potential is illustrated in the digital textbook: Showcase I demonstrates the value of the machine-translated version of the corpus for coarse-grained comparative exploration, while Showcase II provides primarily a more in-depth view into a single original language corpus from an internal comparative perspective. More specifically, Showcase I looks into the gendered dimension of topic preferences in the parliaments across Europe, while Showcase II examines the challenges of applying sentence-level sentiment information to word- and phrase-level concepts, with a focus on exploring longitudinal and party-based variation in parliamentary discourse.

5The textbook materials were developed iteratively and piloted across multiple training events, including DH 2023 (Fišer, Kryvenko, Osenova & Pahor de Maiti, 2023), ESU 2023 (Pahor de Maiti & Kryvenko, 2023; Kryvenko & Pahor de Maiti, 2023), DH 2025 (Fišer, Kryvenko, & Pahor de Maiti, 2025), CDH/CLARIN 2025 (Kryvenko & Pahor de Maiti Tekavčič, 2023), allowing for practical feedback and subsequent refinement.