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
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
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
If you've ever worked under the hood with OTM, you'll know that there's some pretty serious normalization. As I recently explained, deleting a single order can involve traversing over a hundred tables. So, what does this network of table relationships look like? After some quick SQL and a few minutes in Gephi, we get
In redis, every object is either a binary-safe string or collection thereof. Even if you're storing numbers from your client library or using the INCR/DECR counter within redis, the actual values are stored in memory as strings. In some cases, this may be fine; however, if you are storing many numbers, whole or decimal,
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.
I've been busy lately with my new day job and wedding planning , but Dan and I still managed to meet two big goals in the past week. First, we've finalized a stable version of the Electronic World Treaty Index. This is a big deal in the world of international relations and international law,
