In the last post on AWS CloudSearch, I provided a tutorial on the creation of a simple CloudSearch domain for Supreme Court decisions. This walkthrough described the steps of creating a domain, configuring access policies and indexing, populating the index, and using the search API. We were left with a functioning case search database.
It should be pretty clear by now that two things I'm very interested in are cloud computing and legal informatics. What better way to show it than to put together a simple AWS CloudSearch tutorial using Supreme Court decisions as the context? The steps below should take you through creating a fully functional search
Here's a fun example of how you might use my data on Congressional bill length and complexity. Imagine you want to understand the empirical distribution of Flesch-Kincaid reading level for Congressional bills and how this distribution is related to bill stage. A first step might be to visualize this relationship. Based on this
When I put together my original post on the length and complexity of Congressional bills, I was hoping to build forward momentum on the project. The goal was to build a simple, sortable and searchable interface to explore and visualize the data. As usual, however, paying employers and consulting clients got in the way
In case you're too lazy to dig into the full CloudSearch developer guide, here's a quick summary of how to install the CloudSearch API command line tools on Linux: Ensure that you have a JRE/JDK installed. Most distros will ship with something like OpenJDK, which is fine. If you'd like, grab the "Oracle" JDK
Last August, I released an XML copy of the Michigan Compiled Laws (MCL). As an example of what could be done with the structured data, I also created a single-page HTML version generated from the XML. Since then, there's been significant activity in the state statutory arena; my favorite example is Virginia Decoded, a
Where would you go to find out what the longest bill of the 112th Congress was by number of sections (H. R. 1473)? How about by number of unique words (H.R. 3671)? What about by Flesch-Kincaid reading level (S. 475)? Head on over to this table of bills, updated daily for the 112th
Ars had a great write-up a few weeks ago about the huge hash resource starvation attack that was uncovered awhile back (when I say awhile back, I mean from 2003). The press has been focused on the impact for a relatively small number of the affected vendors; this is not only somewhat unfair, but also leads
After a few days of configuration and testing, it's official - bommaritollc.com and computationallegalstudies.com will now be hosted on an AWS EC2 instance with S3 acting as CDN for large files. If you notice any issues with performance or see any missing images, make sure to shoot me an email.
Last year, I covered a number of the so-called "Twitter protests" in China (#cn220), Iran (#25bahman), and Algeria (#fev12). Since these protests began in January 2011, the Arab Spring has claimed many members of both ruling and revolting groups - Mubarak in Egypt, Gaddafi in Libya, Ben Ali in Tunisia, Saleh in Yemen, and
