sgrieve/mp-hack

CW24 hackday project to identify educational background of MPs

Parliamentary Education Census

Can we build a tool to allow people to find MPs with relevant training/expertise/affiliations to help support campaigns/initiatives?

For example, this tool could find all the MPs that studied RSE-adjacent degrees, to identify potential political support for future SSI initiatives.

This is a project to:

1. Create a dataset of which universities MPs have attended, and what subjects they have studied.
2. Explore that dataset

Introduction

There are 650 MPs elected to the UK Houses of Parliament. Although there is lots of open data available about MPs (eg https://www.theyworkforyou.com/) the majority of it is focused on what they DO within parliament, rather than their backgrounds/skills/experience.

The UK university sector is in crisis with 50+ institutions currently going through redundancies. Pushing back against cuts requires coalitions of academics/university staff, politicians, funders and policymakers to make the case for the power/value of research.

(N.B - Not every politician should be university educated and this project is not about arguing that every MP needs a degree, but more to study the cohort of those that do)

Examples

Concrete examples of what the data can be used for and how it can be consulted once everything is running.

How to install

Using venv or poetry or whatever else people may need to make that thing work - package everything up in library format? Is that feasible?

How to get started

What to do more specifically in order to be able to consult the data.

How to get support

How will problems/concerns/comments/feedback addressed?

How to contribute

What's the project's governance re contribution from folks?

Documentation

How is this project documented?

Citing

How shall it be cited?

Licensing

Software is licensed under an MIT license. Text data is taken from Wikipedia and is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0

mp-hack's Issues

clean up/structure the repo/code

Things shouldn't be all in the same directory.

• If we want to have a separation into modules and script code (which I'd say we want to have that), then we'd need a module folder and a separate analysis file that uses the module.
• We should also have something like a data folder (not the database, but all other/interim outputs from our analysis file(s)).

Get the location for each university in the correct format

The frontend will need university locations in decimal degrees, which look like this:

38.9584, -95.2478

We need to generate these data for each university within our dataset.

Write functions to populate CSV database

Need functions to read data from SparQL queries and populate CSV database files:

• mp.csv
• university.csv
• subject.csv
• relationship.csv

Find a method to extract degree names from sentences

Current data is structured as sentence fragments:

"He then studied modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford.Following graduation, Chalk obtained a Graduate Diploma in Law with distinction from the City University London, and qualified as a barrister from the Inns of Court School of Law."

We need to be able to identify the subjects being mentioned: eg Law, Modern History in order to populate rows in our dataset.