SWERIK started officially on March 1, 2023, the same day when PI Fredrik Mohammadi Norén started his new position as an assistant professor in media and communication at Malmö University. However, the work of curating the Swedish parliamentary speeches has been going on since 2020 within the Welfare State Analytics project, in which Fredrik, Måns Magnusson, and Väinö Yrjänäinen also work. Hence, a pilot corpus of parliamentary speeches between 1920–2020 already existed when SWERIK started, with above 90 % estimated accuracy for the identification of speakers.

Now, we have started to import speech data from 1867 to 1919. In version release 0.7, the corpus includes speech data from 1890 to today. Simultaneously, we continue to build the database with members of parliament (MP). The aim is to soon have all MPs in the database, which is a work we do in collaboration with Wikidata volunteers. Then we will start to add relevant metadata to MPs and improve the mapping of MPs to their speeches in the chambers.