Help for Search Form

General Information

• Speaker: Specify any combination of information about the members of the House you are searching for including their party, state, and last name

• Time: Specify the time range; for example if you specify 10:00 to 12:00, this means "search portions of the archives which occur between 10am and noon". Leave the default values of 00:00 to 23:59 if you don't want to constrain the search by time of day

• Date: The range of days to search; for example if you specify 95/02/01 to 95/03/15, this means "search portions of the archive which occur between and include February 2 and March 15, 1995". Leave the default values if you don't want to constain the search by date

• Keywords: Specify search keywords for document search; if any keywords are specified, a WAIS search is performed all available text archives which generates a list of documents containing keyword hits. This list is further reduced using the other search constraints.

• Speaker turns are tagged with one of the following:
  • X seconds: speaker indexing thinks it found the location of the audio for the speaker turn. X is an estimate of how long the person spoke.

  • no speaker index: the indexing system did not tag this speaker (if the same person takes more than one turn in a row, only the first turn is index

  • no audio: our archives do not have processed audio for the speaker turn

• Some speaker turns show up as "*" which means there was a name in the original text congressional record which is not in our database (possibly due to a spelling error in the transcript).

Documents vs. Speaker Turns

The original text transcripts published by the GPO are divided into documents which typically contain records of debate on a single topic (alhtough this is not always true). To align text and audio, we also divide the text records by speaker turn, so we have two ways of breaking up the same transcript: by document, or by speaker. "Maximum document hits" specifies the maximum number of documents that will be returned by the WAIS search. This value is ignored if no keywords are specified.

"Maximum speaker turns" specifies the maximum number of speaker turns listed in the search results. If keywords are specified, the search is truncated whenever the first of the two maximum hit criteria is met.

Note that the wais search is done first, and then other search constraints are applied to the results of the WAIS search. If you are doing a highly constrained search which includes keyword specification, you will need to set the maximum documents parameter to a large value.

Since the WAIS keyword search is done at a document level, there is no guarantee that every speaker turns returned as part of a document will contain any of the search keywords or even be about the main topic of the document.

Examples

Party:		Any
State: 		(blank)
Last Name:	(blank)
Time range: 	13:00 to 17:00
Date range: 	95/01/15 to 95/03/20
Keywords:   	(blank)
Meaning:    	"Find all speech which occured between the hours
		of 1pm and 5pm on all days between January 15 and March 20
		of 1995 inclusive"


Party:		Democrats only
State: 		CA
Last Name:	(blank)
Time range: 	(default)
Date range: 	95/01/01 to 95/06/30
Keywords:   	budget
Meaning:    	"Find all speech by Democrats from California containing
		 the word 'budget' which occured between January 1 and June 30, 1995"


Party:		Any
State: 		(blank)
Last Name:	Bono
Time range: 	(default)
Date range: 	(default)
Keywords:   	music
Meaning:    	"Find all speech by Sonny Bono containing the keyword 'music'"

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