Speaker metadata

[oliviercailloux]

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Judging from the online Congressional Record Index, it seems that the data contains proper markings about who speeks when (among house and senate members): it is possible to search for speeches by a given person using the “more options” box.

Is it possible to access this metadata by API?

An example just to be clear. Say I am interested in this text. I know that I can access this text using the Congress (or Gov) API but I would also like to extract who says which parts (in this example, Mr. AKAKA speaks from “Mr. President, ” to “our Constitution.”, then Ms. CANTWELL, …).

It is of course possible to parse the text and extract this information by searching for “Mr. XXX” or “Ms. XXX” patterns, but this seems much more error-prone than benefiting from proper metadata.

I did not find out any documentation about this, so I am afraid that it is currently impossible, but I couldn’t refrain from asking anyway: as the information exists, I hope that it can be accessed somehow.