spaceTexts: A Corpus of Speeches in the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space

State and nonstate actors gather annually at the United Nations (UN) Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) to debate, deliberate, and exchange information regarding the use and exploration of outer space. Established as an ad hoc committee in the wake of the 1957 launch of Sputnik I, today COPUOS is one of the largest committees in the UN and serves as the preeminent diplomatic venue for the discussion of legal, political, and technical issues arising from the international community's use of space. Previously only fully available in physical archives, this project digitizes and makes available speeches from the General Debate/General Exchange of Views section. The individual statements are stored in plain text files with associated metadata to assist in natural language processing. The original transcripts are also available for download, and more details can be found in the README file.