This digital textbook aims to provide a step-by-step introduction to using parliamentary proceedings as a datasource fit for multidisciplinary research questions. To this end, it specifically uses the ParlaMint corpora – a cluster of 29 corpora containing records of plenary sessions from European parliaments spanning at least the years of 2015 and early 2022. The great advantage of ParlaMint lies in its careful design which allows to respect national particularities while ensuring comparability between single parliaments through a common timeframe and a broad set of shared metadata categories as well as through an addition of machine-translated proceedings to English on top of the original transcripts. This makes ParlaMint not only relevant for individual studies into parliamentary discourse and activity, but also extensively useful for comparable studies that are of growing importance in our interlinked world plagued ever more with hostile political polarisation, populist movements and a loss of shared vision for the future.