"It would therefore be highly desirable if parties made all of their communication available as plain text documents and if database projects such as the Manifesto Project or OPTED6 were further strengthened and funded." Also the rest of this article is highly recommendable!
also, i plan(ed) to publish the English translations of the roughly 200 manifestos I have. however, the (legal) jury is still out to determine if I’m allowed to — possible copyright infringement…
on a more serious note, though, I find it really shocking and even scandalous how many resources (both money and time) are wasted on these rather mundane tasks like file conversion or text extraction. just imagine how many scientists spent numerous hours (and thus tax payers‘ money) on this. 🤯
thank you so much, @tiondelisa.bsky.social! my (conspiracy) theory is that parties that publish plain txt files of their manifestos/communication have political scientists working in their offices. 😅