inquiRy

inquiRy is an R package to extract written evidence from UK Parliament Select Committee inquiries. inquiRy was written as my final project for CS50's Programming with R. Watch a video walkthrough of inquiRy below!

Guide

1. Load main.R into RStudio
2. Call written_submissions(n, clean = TRUE)
   • Replace n with a Select Committee inquiry's unique ID (to find this, go to an inquiry's landing page and take the four digit number from the URL e.g. 1813.
   • If clean is set to true (or not specified), redundant text will be removed from the start of written evidence.
3. A CSV file is saved to cwd.
   • Each row corresponds to an individual piece of written evidence submitted to the inquiry
   • Each row has three fields: a unique ID, an author(s), and raw evidence text.
4. To view / manipulate the resulting data in RStudio, asign written_submissions's return value to a variable e.g., data <- written_submissions(1813, clean = TRUE).

How it Works

inquiRy is a package written in R. inquiRy contains six functions:

1. written_submissions (main function (calls other functions); stored in main.R)
2. check_input
3. get_document_ids
4. get_submitters
5. get_documents
6. clean_evidence

inquiRy requires six external packages:

1. glue
2. httr
3. xml2
4. jsonlite
5. base64enc
6. dplyr

The package comes with test files (test-that) as well as man file documentation.

inquiRy uses Parliament's Select Committee API. Functions generally retrieve data as JSON via GET requests.

Select Committees?

In the UK, Parliamentary Select Committees are cross-party groups of MPs and Lords which investigate specific issues and scrutinise the work of Government.

Select Committees perform inquiries, gathering written evidence from organisations and members of the public, and oral evidence sessions. Select Committees write reports with recommendations which the Government responds to.

Select Committees perform their work openly. Reports and their underlying evidence are published freely on Parliament's website.

About Me

Hello, World - I'm Ross Coron!

I'm a Senior Analyst at the UK's National Audit Office. My previous policy positions include the House of Lords (UK Parliament), the Department of Health and Social Care, and Blood Cancer UK.

Prior to hanging around Whitehall, I was a biochemist at Imperial College London, Institut Pasteur (Paris), and the University of St Andrews.

I'm interested in all-things policy, programming, pipetting. Let's connect!

• LinkedIn - LINK
• Twitter - LINK
• GitHub - LINK

---