Meeting number for hearing type?

CSL Development
1

One of the most useful scrapers that I have running locally is for
committee transcripts of the Japanese National Diet. It’s a hack at
the moment, and depends on a hacked schema and invalid CSL. I would
like to find a way to make it compatible with CSL and move it into
Zotero main.

The archive of transcripts covers all committee hearings from 1945 to
the present. It is among the largest unified repositories of such
text on the Web. Apart from being an important resource for research
into law, policy and politics, it has a role as test data for NLP
tools that operate on Japanese. So it’s just one site, but it’s an
important one.

In the archive, records are identified by:

legislative body (upper or lower house); then by
legislative session, then by
committee name, then by
a sequence number identifying the committee session

The transcript of an individual meeting should be treated as a
document unit. Currently, my scraper returns this information in the
following Zotero fields:

legislativeBody
session
committee
meetingNumber

As far as I can tell, none of these fields are represented in CSL.
They could be mapped, but I’m not sure what the correct mapping would
be. Perhaps:

legislativeBody = collection-title
(i.e. Japanese National Diet)

session = collection-number
(i.e. 171st session)

chamber = container-title
(i.e. House of Representatives)

committee = title
(i.e. Committee on Legal Affairs)

meetingNumber = number
(i.e. 2nd meeting)

Not sure, though. Does that seem sensible?

Frank

2

…

The archive of transcripts covers all committee hearings from 1945 to
the present. It is among the largest unified repositories of such
text on the Web. Apart from being an important resource for research
into law, policy and politics, it has a role as test data for NLP
tools that operate on Japanese. So it’s just one site, but it’s an
important one.

And it illustrates issues with govt. hearings in general, and has some
issues related to legislation.

In the archive, records are identified by:

legislative body (upper or lower house); then by
legislative session, then by
committee name, then by
a sequence number identifying the committee session

The transcript of an individual meeting should be treated as a
document unit. Currently, my scraper returns this information in the
following Zotero fields:

legislativeBody
session
committee
meetingNumber

As far as I can tell, none of these fields are represented in CSL.

This is a little tricky, and don’t think I have good answers. I was
just looking at biblatex to see if he covers this, and as near I can
tell he hasn’t:

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/biblatex.html

Aside: in general, biblatex is nicely done. We should take a closer
look before pushing out CSL 0.9.

We have testimony presented at a hearing (an event) before some
legislative sub-body (an “authority”?). The session is used to quality
the organization, and the meeting number applies to the event within
the context of the committee.

They could be mapped, but I’m not sure what the correct mapping would
be. Perhaps:

legislativeBody = collection-title
(i.e. Japanese National Diet)

I’m not sure this feels right; more like a secondary contributor?

session = collection-number
(i.e. 171st session)

chamber = container-title
(i.e. House of Representatives)

committee = title
(i.e. Committee on Legal Affairs)

meetingNumber = number
(i.e. 2nd meeting)

Not sure, though. Does that seem sensible?

I think we probably need some new variables, but need to think about
this. If you have ideas, please post them.

Bruce