When looking up court cases it can get very confusing and overwhelming when trying to find the right case. I can relate as a political science major myself when looking up cases it is nice to have a concrete reliable website that can help guide you to specific supporting cases. This weeks reading guided me to a website that does just this.
This website titled criminalintent.org goes through a tutorial of a new project using Datamining to bring together three online resources known as Old Bailey Onine, Zotero, and TAPoP. Old Bailey is an online resource that uses controlled vocabulary to search through 127 million words of trial accounts. Users can query this website through a dedicated API. Zotero is an information management tool and TAPoR uses analytical tools like Voyeur.
When I came across this word datamining I thought it could have something to do with sorting data in a deeper more analytical way. I decided to look up the definition and landed on a website by the UCLA Anderson School of Management. It stated that data mining, “is a process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information.” They describe it as a way to look at data through different dimensions and angles to find patterns and trends.
The Criminal Intent website is very unique because it does just this. This new user friendly website allows users to easily look up information of any case by keyword, gender, date range, verdict, crime, etc. The website will automatically filter the results based on your selections and tell you how many cases were found and how many, “hits” of the terms you selected.
What I found interesting about this website is how I can connect this to my International Law course I am taking at UCLA. For me this is where it started getting confusing and less specific. For example, if I wanted to look up something to do with international law in the keyword text box it would separately search for international and then law. This is when I learned the website is directed more at users looking for only cases pertaining to London between 1674 and 1913. However, as I continued playing with the search engine on the Old Bailey API website I was able to create a new Voyeur Tools corpus from the result set of female defendants by clicking on “send to Voyeur”.
This was the most fun part of my adventure through this website. There are about 20 different graphical tools available in Voyeur to visual your data. The default is, Cirrus (a word cloud visualization), Summary (an overview of the corpus including word counts and aggregate trends) and Reader (a scalable text reader that can be used to scroll very large documents). You can change or add more visuals to sort your data. IT is possible to export a corpus by clicking on the “skin export” icon and choosing a skin builder. This is a very interactive and personal way of sorting case data.
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/obapi/
http://criminalintent.org/getting-started/
http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.frand/teacher/technologies/palace/datamining.htm