About Ελένη
Ελένη is an AI-ready digital repository of political discourse. It holds the debates of the Greek Parliament from 1862 (the Second National Assembly) to 1967 (the Eighth Period). The main source of the corpus is the volumes of the stenographic record of the debates, published first as the Episimos Efimeris tis Ethnosyneleuseos and the Episimos Efimeris tis Syneleuseos, and from 1865 to 1967 as the Efimeris ton Syzitiseon tis Voulis (note: until the restoration of democracy in 1974, the Praktika ton Synedriaseon tis Voulis were a separate publication, and they are not included here).
Ελένη is the result of a multi-stage process: gathering the material, image pre-processing, optical recognition with artificial-intelligence models (specifically Google Gemini 3/3.1 Pro), extensive post-processing of the raw digitised text with Python code, the addition of metadata, and intensive manual correction. The digitisation was done from scratch, starting from the photographs of the source material available in the online collection of the Library of the Hellenic Parliament (CC BY 4.0). Alongside them, a large number of copies of the Efimeris, donated by the Library of the Hellenic Parliament or bought from Greek antiquarian booksellers, were scanned anew, and volumes were photographed on site in libraries across the country. In all, thousands of pages of the Efimeris were scanned that are either missing from the officially catalogued material or defective in it, and volumes came to light that had never been photographed before.
In all, Ελένη brings together:
- Volumes of the Efimeris
- 180
- Sittings
- 7,294
- Rows
- 16.3 million
- Words
- about 123 million
- Turns
- 1,183,125
Institutional and technical support
Ελένη is hosted on the website of the National Centre for Social Research and will remain permanently available to the public at the same web address. The principal investigator will go on completing and curating the collection, correcting the text and adding new material. Future corrections and additions do not affect existing citations; see How to cite.
Principal investigator
Ελένη was created by Paris Aslanidis, political scientist and researcher at the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE).
Contact
Write to paslanidis ekke gr.
Funding
Ελένη was created at the National Centre for Social Research as part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral project GREEKPOP (grant agreement 101154365, duration 2024.09.01–2026.08.31), held by the researcher Paris Aslanidis, under the European Union's research and innovation programme Horizon Europe 2021–2027.
Acknowledgements
Ελένη owes its existence to the staff of the Library of the Hellenic Parliament, the Municipal Library of Athens, the General State Archives, the Historical Archive of the National Bank of Greece and other libraries, who contributed to gathering the source material. The management and staff of the National Centre for Social Research gave the project vital support, helping to clear away every problem that arose along the way.
Licence
The texts of Ελένη are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0): you may use, redistribute and adapt them freely, as long as you credit the source. The automatic summaries are available under the same licence, always marked as AI-generated.