Instructions

Browsing the material

The homepage shows the collection as a bookcase: each book on the shelf stands for one parliamentary session. Its thickness shows the number of sittings and its height the total number of words, and the label on the spine gives the period and the session. The empty places with a dashed outline are sessions whose stenographic record has, unfortunately, not been located.

• Point at a book and its name appears, with the session's details in the panel on the left: dates, number of sittings and words, and presidency.
• Click a book to select it: it stays raised and outlined, and the panel keeps it open until you press × or Esc, or choose another book. Every book offers two options: List sittings, for the list of its sittings, and Download .zip (see Downloads).

The Index lists every parliamentary period and session, with its years, like the index of a book. Each session leads to the list of its sittings.

Search

Search from the search box on the homepage. Note that the unit of text a search looks in is the turn: the text of a single intervention by a member of Parliament during a sitting, whatever its length. There are two kinds of search:

Searching for a member of Parliament

Choose Member of Parliament and type the surname (or its first letters) of the member you are interested in, to find all of their turns. The Advanced search offers further options and filters. Note: names are recorded as they were printed, so the same person may appear under several spellings.

The results page has the list of turns on the left and, on the right, the text of the sitting open at the selected turn. Above the results, the Turns by year timeline shows the member's turns in each year (see Timeline). Narrow the results by period/session and/or dates, or with the Turns by year timeline itself (click a year, or drag across the span of years you want). Each active filter shows as a card that can be removed by clicking its ×.

Searching the text

Choose Word/Phrase and enter what you want to find in the text of the sittings. Terms with a * need at least three letters. Accents, breathings and other diacritics (acute, rough breathing, diaeresis and so on) and capital letters make no difference: everything is matched in lower case without accents. Each result leads to a particular turn by a member of Parliament, in chronological order, with the excerpt and the rows where the word was found.

The Advanced search page offers many more filters and ways of combining search terms.

Examples:

• There is no lemmatisation: for the forms of a word use the *, for example κυβερνησ*.
• A * at the start of a term (*ριασις, *ριασι*) works for single words only; it cannot be used inside phrases or with ~. If too many words match, the search will ask for more letters.
• Acronyms are found with or without full stops, e.g. Π.Α.Ο.Κ. = ΠΑΟΚ.
• Numbers are found with or without thousands separators and decimal marks, e.g. 1.926 = 1926.
• The Advanced search option Everywhere/without tables/tables only: roll-call votes, lists of members present, financial statements and similar material appear as markdown tables. With "without tables" a term is searched for outside the tables; with "tables only", in the tables alone.
• Very common words, e.g. και or της, cannot be searched on their own, because of the sheer number of results.
• Highlighting. On the results page, every match in the text is marked in orange. When a turn holds more than one match, the counter at the top of the toolbox shows which one you are looking at, e.g. "3/12", and the ‹ › buttons step to the previous or next match.

Timeline

Above the results of a text search, the strip titled Occurrences by year shows in how many turns your terms were found in each year. On the results page of a member-of-Parliament search, the Turns by year timeline shows that member's turns per year.

• Point at a year to see its figures.
• Click a year: the results are limited to that year (the "From" and "To" fields are filled in). Shift+click a second year: a range of years. Clicking the only selected year again removes the filter (as does clicking × on the date's card).
• Count (the default): the number of turns. Per 1,000 turns: the same number against all the turns of that year, so that years with many sittings do not look bigger than they are.
• A dashed baseline and no bar: a year whose volume has not been located. A gap: a year without sittings.
• Turns are counted, not occurrences of words: a speech that repeats the word ten times counts once.
• Hide folds the timeline to its title line, to save space.

Toolboxes

When you are reading a sitting, the horizontal toolbox just above the text gathers all its tools, grouped as follows:

• SUMMARY [AI]: opens a panel to the right of the text with the sitting's two automatic summaries (see Summaries), so you can read them alongside the text.
• SITTING:
  • Go to the previous/next sitting.
  • Download the sitting as a .txt file (three options; see Downloads).
• VIEW:
  • Edition rows: the text as it was set in the Efimeris, as faithfully as possible, with every row numbered and §n where a new turn begins.
  • Running text: the rows joined into flowing text, with words hyphenated at the end of a row made whole again, for easier reading and for analysis by AI models.
• SELECTION:
  • Save Citation: the selected passage as a .txt file, with its citation and related metadata in the header.
  • Clear the selection.

The column to the left of the sitting's text lets you search for a term within the sitting, with the same rules as text search (phrases, word beginnings, proximity and so on). It also offers two separate ways through the sitting's turns:

• By speaker: every member of Parliament who took the floor in the sitting, those who spoke most often first, with how many times each did. Clicking a name takes you to their first turn and each further click to the next, so you can follow one speaker through the whole sitting.
• In order: every turn in sequence, with the speaker's name and the rows.

On a search results page, the toolbox includes:

• RESULTS:
  • ‹ › to go to the previous/next occurrence of the word within the same turn.
  • Go to the previous/next turn in the list of results.
• SITTING:
  • New tab, to open the whole sitting in a window of its own.

Citing

Ελένη lets you cite any passage of the sittings directly, from a single row to a range of rows, a particular turn by a member of Parliament, or a whole sitting.

Every citation is a unique web address (URL) that leads back into Ελένη, exactly to the passage cited. This makes any bibliographic reference to the text of the Greek Parliament's debates exceptionally easy to look up, to share and to verify.

How to get a citation

• For a single row, click its number. For a range of rows, drag the mouse across the text, from the start to the end of the passage you want. Press Copy Citation in the toolbox (or simply copy the URL from your browser) to get the citation. To select a whole turn, whatever its length, click the numbered §n that introduces it, next to the member of Parliament's name.
• The Save Citation button in the toolbox downloads a .txt file with the selected passage. The citation is in the file's header, together with other metadata.

Citation forms

What stays stable

• Rows are the main anchor. Every line of text is a row, and the numbering within a sitting never changes.
• The base of the addresses, https://eleni.ekke.gr, will remain stable, with the institutional guarantee of the National Centre for Social Research.

What you cannot cite

• A sitting's summary: it is automatic (AI-generated) and not an official text.
• The pages of the printed edition. Ελένη is an AI-ready digital corpus, not bound to the pagination of its source material, so rows are not matched to the page of the original print on which they appeared. If you need a page reference, you can find the passage in the Efimeris at a library and cite the page or pages instead of the web citation. Libraries holding volumes of the Efimeris include:
  • Benaki Library
  • Library of the Hellenic Parliament, Parliament Building
  • Library of the Academy of Athens
  • Library of the Bank of Greece
  • General State Archives
  • National Library of Greece
  • Municipal Library of Athens
  • Historical Archive of the National Bank of Greece
  • Alpha Bank Library
  • Library of the War Museum
  • Library of the Konstantinos Karamanlis Foundation
  • Historical Library of the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation

Tables

Votes, budgets and other registers or lists appear as markdown tables, with ordinary row numbering. Above each table, the Extract table button lets you download it as CSV (for a spreadsheet), as markdown, or as a Citation (a .txt file).

Summaries

Every sitting of more than 400 words offers two summaries in Greek. They were made with two different large language models (LLMs), given exactly the same instructions: what happened in the sitting, what the main issues were, who played the substantive roles, what was decided and what was left unresolved. The model and the date of production are given at the top of each summary. The summaries are not part of the original edition, were not checked one by one and may contain errors. They are simply an aid to finding your way in the text.

Downloads

Every download is marked with the icon. A sitting, or a whole session, downloads in one of three forms:

• Edition rows (.txt): as printed in the Efimeris, with numbered rows and hyphenation, and the start of every turn marked (§n).
• Running text (AI-ready) (.txt): one paragraph per turn, opening with the name of the member of Parliament, without row or turn numbers, and with hyphenated words joined. Tables keep their lines, between [TABLE] and [/TABLE]. Best for reading and for AI models.
• Turns (JSONL) (.jsonl): one JSON line per turn, with citation, date, period, session, sitting, turn number, speaker, first and last row, and the text as running text. Best for computational work: every result leads back to its rows.

Where to find them:

• A whole session: from the index, the homepage or the session's page.
• A whole sitting: with Download in its toolbox.
• A table: with the Extract table button at its top right, as .csv, .md or as a citation (a .txt of the table's rows with the citation in the header).
• A speaker's turns: with the current filters (.csv or .jsonl).
• One passage (.txt): with Save Citation in the sitting's toolbox.

Settings

Ελένη uses a simple cookie to remember the following: the menu language (Greek or English), light or dark theme, and rows or running text.

Things to keep in mind

• The text has been corrected exhaustively, but in a corpus of about 123 million words some recognition errors are bound to remain. If you find a recurring or serious one, let us know.
• Alternative spellings of words or names that prevailed in turn over the corpus's 100-plus years have not been corrected (e.g. «πληρόνω» for «πληρώνω», «ΜΠΟΤΖΑΡΗΣ» for «ΜΠΟΤΣΑΡΗΣ»). Obvious slips by the stenographers or the typesetters, on the other hand, have been corrected (e.g. «Καραμνλής» for «Καραμανλής»).
• The division of the sittings into the turns of members of Parliament was made computationally and checked thoroughly, but errors may remain. If you find one, let us know.
• The oath-taking sitting of the members of Parliament at the start of a session, where it survives, is numbered 0 and appears in citations as "Opening sitting". In some sessions the record then continues with Sitting 2: no sitting is missing.
• Wherever text has been found to be missing from a sitting, the place is marked with the symbol ☐. If you come across an omission that has not been marked, let us know.