Tonight, Eric and I will be presenting back-to-back talks at the AWS Michigan meetup (hosted by the Tech Brewery this time). Eric will be detailing a large Matlab HPC experiment we ran this summer to optimize parameters for a trading strategy; this one is a great AWS case study, as we crunch 10B inputs
Here's one purely for fun - a wordcloud built from the Supreme Court's opinion on Arizona et al. v United States. Word clouds, though certainly not the most scientific of visualization techniques, are often engaging and "fun" ways to lead into discussion on NLP or topic modeling. Arizona et al. v United States wordcloud
You may have noticed that I keep talking about eDiscovery consulting and legal search in the cloud. I've covered searching the Supreme Court with new technologies in analytics and the cloud, making certain types of emails searchable on Amazon's cloud, and even eDiscovery and the cloud at a high level. While these posts are
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
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
Dan and I recently released a new legal informatics project with a few colleagues. The project, which we've named the Legal Language Explorer, provides an interface similar to Google Ngrams Viewer for the U.S. Supreme Court. Unlike Google's viewer, however, the Legal Language Explorer also allows users to drill-down into case-level information for each n-gram.
