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Quotable Cases

One way to lend dramatic narrative and an element of fun to learning about Case Law is to pick out choice quotes from Judges which encapsulate the drama of the matter at hand. This is what our team intended to do with a section of the website which would offer a pull quote from one of the Judges offering an explanation as to why they ruled a certain way. This offered up the chance to humanize and make personal the drama of the court room, in addition to identifying the quirks of each of the judges. I’m unsure if this part of the website has been implemented due to time constraints, but in the above image one can see text for the landmark texts which I pulled from the “Decision” data from Joanne, then identified a section of it under 350 characters that would encapsulate the case. Some examples follow: “Brennan found that it was implicit in the history of the First Amendment that obscenity, matter that was utterly without redeeming social importance, should be restrained.” “Justice Douglas wrote the majority opinion and held the postal law unconstitutional because it required an official act (returning the reply card) as a limitation on the unfettered exercise of the addressee’s First Amendment rights.”

Down the line, if someone were able to spend the time and draw direct quotes from the courtroom, much like this website does https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/305/texas-v-johnson it would give each landmark case the attention it deserves. There is human drama in addition to all the technical text and one hallmark of our project was highlighting these elements. 

Another part of our “nice to haves” that down the line would be very interesting to implement is a way to track the changing positions of Judges across time. As far as I know, there aren’t other websites that do this. But if one were able to highlight the political position of Judges across a spectrum of cases and decades it would be noteworthy. As far as charting the prevailing politics of the time it would be useful for students of law to navigate legal theory by how it applied to different law-makers “textualist vs originalist” for example. On the other hand, it might only be seen as necessary to the fine-grained scholarship that very few actively pursue.

Back-end work (2 of 3) FOS Case Inclusion

Earlier on in the project, we had to define which of the cases in American Legal History dealt with Freedom of Speech. It was from here that the rest of the project followed. Joanne provided a list of cases that it was my job to go back over and do a manual check regarding if we should include them in the project. 

The first part of this was double checking to see if it was a landmark case or not. We eventually ended up with around 65. Then we had to see if Freedom of Speech was really at issue in these cases. Again, this is a subjective manual process and anyone else who undertook this project could have ended up with a relatively different list. We had to make some hard decisions about what to include in our final list. Was freedom of religion an FOS case? What if it involved talking about religion in public, or handing out pamphlets in school? Essentially it came down to identifying how the Judge ruled on a certain case. If FOS was at issue, no matter the subject, we included it. If it was clearly Freedom of Religion or Freedom of Press we gave it a second look. 

Because we were short of time we really relied on the frequency of the phrase “freedom of speech” to identify cases to include. There were a number of bundled topics through which we sifted for FOS cases to include, the following are a few examples: “legislative investigations: concerning internal security only”, “federal or state internal security legislation: Smith, Internal Security, and related federal statutes” “loyalty oath or non-Communist affidavit (other than bar applicants, government employees, political party, or teacher)”. These to some degree mirrored our Topic Modeling results.

Back-end work (1 of 3) Topic Designation

The following three posts will detail the back-end work and data sorting I helped out with in the late stages of the project. 

The Primary Category designation for ~ 500 FOS cases was necessary for creating the “Explore by Topic” page of our website. Eva conducted a Topic Modeling survey of all of the caes matching them up with 20 different topics. Each of the topics contained a set of words which established a theme. It would take keen subject area knowledge to really get this down right from the beginning, but I feel we were able to group up all the cases in some logical and thematic sense.

Each of the cases was given a probability with which it belonged to that category. For the most part, if a case had a percentage above 50% I tossed it into that category. There were a few categories which struck me as containing a lot of formal language and for case which hovered around 50%-60% and below, I took their next highest category and put them in there.

To determine which category the case belonged to I had to conduct a quick survey of the case’s text by looking at the syllabus and summaries available online from websites such as https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/encyclopedia/. This process is quick and dirty which not always the highest degree of accuracy, but it’s important for bundling these in conjunction with input from the Topic Modeling survey. Naturally topics like “school.religious.schools.student.establishment.religion.students.forum.program.university” lend themselves to clearer topics than do  “solicitation.charitable.fraud.paid.fee.organizations.requirement.telemarketers.circulators.north” at first glance, but this issue spoke to my general unfamiliarity with the wide variety of cases. It turned out there were indeed a large number of these kinds of cases unbeknownst to me.

Post-showcase FOS* reflection | personal blog

Now that the showcase is done and our papers are handed in, my reflections on the Freedom of Speech* project are taking a different form. The intensely action-oriented thoughts and feelings of the last six weeks were marked by a combination of stress and optimism: there was so much work to be done, but I always found my self talk leaning towards “it’s going to happen” (until the last day, when it switched to a tired but satisfied-enough “it’s going to be what it is”).

Now, without the deadline of a presentation and audience looming, I’m much less stressed about the project. But without the motivation of that deadline, I’m less optimistic about its future. As a recovering perfectionist, I am now okay with the idea that a project can be useful and valid without functioning 100% seamlessly. But I want the tool to work as well as possible so that people can use it without encountering faulty information or frustrating glitches, and that’s definitely not the case yet. But it’s hard to imagine going back to it without my whole group there to share in the process.

It’s lead me to wonder if the site is a beta version or a rough draft. To me, calling it a beta version implies that the same site will be reworked and updated, and the final product would look and function similarly, but at a higher level. Calling it a rough draft (which is increasingly how I feel about the Explore page) opens the door to many more revisions, not just functionality upgrades. For one thing, I’m not nearly as excited about the topic model results now as I was when I first ran the model, and I wonder if they really add much value to the Explore page. The topic model proved a fun exploratory analysis tool, but I think its merits are more limited than I first imagined, especially in the face of the manual data grouping that Martin and Joanne did to make the eras on the timeline.

Thinking about that now brings me back to my first semester in this program — I took a GIS course at Hunter College (Intro to Cartography and Geovisualization), and my major takeaway was that good maps are 10% GIS and 90% context and design. The actual “truth” of the coordinates and GIS layers is obviously important to get right, but the vast majority of communicating the argument or point of a map comes from everything else: colors, labels, statistical breaks, symbology, and maybe most importantly, context. That’s how I’m feeling about the topic model: however cool or interesting the results are, they’re probably only about 10% of the way towards making a good end product. I didn’t leave enough time to build out that context or consider how I would lead a user through the topic model, and in the end, I find Martin’s context-rich descriptions of the eras of free speech to be a much more compelling part of the site.

I think the topic model has potential, but implementing it in a way that really helps users to gain new knowledge about freedom of speech cases would require, at the least:

  • including the full 10-word topic somewhere, not just a representative title, so that users can see the words that make up a topic
  • including a quick definition of what topic modeling is
  • omitting the topic model data point for cases where it adds little to no value, as in cases where the top topic is a mix of unspecific words (this is true of a lot of cases) or cases that don’t have a strong one or two topics

Those are my thoughts for the future of the Explore page topic model, which in truth probably isn’t even top of my list to fix up (looking at you, wrong case showing up in the case modal). As far as deadlines go… I’m definitely taking the coming week off. Five fully online courses later, I maybe feel more beat than I ever have at the end of a school year and am 100% ready for the semester to be over: for some summer, some days outside without opening my computer, and some sleep.

After that, maybe I’ll hit up our group’s Discord server to run my tech edits by them, set a one week deadline, and see if I can squeeze a few more days of “it’s going to happen” energy into the project.

Something of a Retrospective – A Goodbye, Too

I’m fairly sure I’ve missed a post or two, so consider this a combination make-up-farewell post. I want to start by saying that it was a pleasure to work alongside everyone in this course, not just my group. I think being in a classroom environment where everyone is in a similar boat to you with regards to working on a group project made me more comfortable working on my own. To clarify, even in other courses where I’m working on a project, not everyone in that class is working in a group – some work alone, some work in pairs, some work with more. I suppose it’s a matter of feeling secure, if anything.

Something that has come up across all of my classes at least tangentially this semester is the idea of memory and how it interacts with other more immaterial concepts, such as narrative and archiving. It’s made me think about how the memories of not simply this class, but how each of our projects will affect their their respective “environments” (“environment” as in “environment scan”) over time. This may seem needlessly existential, but, how will these projects look after they go dormant? That is, for the projects that are going to receive constant updates, I wonder how they will look at their culmination-before-stagnation, how they look before they go otherwise untouched for an indefinite period of time.

On a brighter note, I’ve also been wondering what will happen when (and if, I suppose) one of us will be reading some scholarly article or academic paper and see one of our projects cited in it. In fact, one of us could even encounter it in a more casual, mainstream context.

I’d also like to put an idea I’ve been toying with forward – during this semester, I looking at heraldry as a form of rebus, which posed a number of intrinsic and distinct challenges. For instance, the fact that when one “solves” a coat of arms, one will generally end up with a far more abstract and less defined result than when one solves a rebus. Indeed, “solving” a coat of arms is more like a fusion of mapping an area and analyzing a painting, while solving a rebus is more like a combination of solving a math problem and analyzing a poem: in the case of the former, it’s less straight-forward, and there are theoretically multiple, possibly radically different yet still correct methods and answers. So, I pose this question: while heraldry has connections to conventional rebuses that aren’t too obscure, what items, further removed from heraldry, could be interpreted as one would interpret a rebus?

Whatever the case may be, I wish you all the best of luck in your endeavors, and I look forward to potentially working with any or all of you next semester. Farewell, and have a lovely summer.

Freedom of Speech* Project – Group Report

May 20th, 2021

Co-authored by Martin Glick, Kevin Pham, Joanne Ramadani, and Eva Sibinga

1. Team

Eva Sibinga (Developer + research/text analysis) is in her final semester of the Grad Center’s Data Analysis & Visualization program. Her research interests include data ethics, the intersection of race and technology, and the application of feminist theory to contemporary data questions. With a background in English Literature and Visual Art, her approach to data analysis and visualization is motivated by a desire to expand the way we tell stories and understand the world through our own eyes and others’. Eva is one half of Freedom of Speech*’s core data and developer team, focusing on the statistical topic model and… a lot… of web development.

Joanne Ramadani (Developer + research/text analysis) is an information designer, data analyst, and web developer. She is currently a candidate for a Master’s degree in Data Analytics & Visualization at the CUNY Graduate Center. A “reformed” law nerd, she majored in English and Political Science in undergrad, training her attention to detail and developing her logic skills, which she now uses to scrutinize data and create fun visualizations that seek the best way to deliver information to as many people as possible. As the other half of the core data and developer team on Freedom of Speech*, Joanne’s responsibilities include cleaning and processing legal data, ideating visualizations on the design end, and co-building the code structure of the website, including the technical aspect of visualizing content.

Kevin Pham (UX/UI lead + research/text analysis) is a first-year MA in Digital Humanities student, and holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from UC Berkeley. Kevin leads Freedom of Speech*’s design team, and is also a part of the research team. He primarily leads design ideation, produces high-fidelity wireframes for the website, and creates the project’s key pieces of branding. Kevin’s personal research generally sits at the intersection of race, critical theory, and the history of digital culture and media, with hopes of exploring theoretical interventions within the Digital Humanities.

Martin Glick (Project Manager + research/text analysis) is a Graduate Student at the CUNY Graduate Center pursuing an M.A. in Digital Humanities. He has a B.A. in Philosophy from City College (CUNY), an M.A. in Philosophy at Birkbeck College (University of London), and conducted independent research at the University of Göttingen from 2013-2017. His favorite movie is Alien, and he wrote a chapter about it in a volume for the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series. He is the project manager and contributes to the Outreach program.

2. Project Narrative

The Freedom of Speech Project emerged in response to the many factors that prevent the average reasonable person from understanding what “freedom of speech” actually means. Legal language is often inaccessible, case structures are arcane, verdicts are littered with potentially confusing and unfamiliar terms, and context is key to understanding the significance of most Court decisions. Most of the general public is unfamiliar with how the law works, not realizing that legislation and/or the Constitution is really just the beginning in determining what is considered “legal.” Indeed, while the First Amendment may be understood as a determining, theoretical base for freedom of speech protection, individual cases and case law determine how the freedom of speech is actually practiced and shaped. 

The intentional limiting of scope and dynamic presentation of a thesis are the two major ways in which the Freedom of Speech* Project addresses these conventional barriers to understanding Court verdicts, while still keeping site users close to the Court’s original language.

When a user arrives at our landing page, or on the Explore or Guided modes of the Freedom of Speech* website, that person has already bypassed a mountain of obstacles that stand between the average internet denizen and a coherent understanding of Supreme Court verdicts on free speech. For one (very important) thing, cases on the Freedom of Speech* website are pre-filtered. Thanks to lots of coded and manual data work by Martin and Joanne, the cases on the site are only those that relate to the First Amendment freedom of speech protection, not “all cases” or even “all First Amendment cases.” The site has a narrower scope than say, the Supreme Court Database or Oyez.org, and in that directed purpose lies one of its greatest merits in the sometimes overwhelming field of court verdict databases. 

Furthermore, our site is not only a database. It offers the user a thesis: freedom of speech protection is not static or limitless, but rather constantly changing in response to American values and anxieties. It’s not a partisan statement, just an observation of the tension between free speech in the Constitution and in case law. This comes implicitly through the option to filter by speech protection status, and explicitly through the Guided eras that lay out the stakes of free speech in different time periods. The site provides a critical intervention in the largely uncritical public “discussion” of the freedom of speech, pointing out both the very few words actually used in the Constitution’s oft-cited protection, and the many cases in which the Court put legal restrictions on the freedom of speech and an individual’s or group’s speech was not protected. 

One category of similar websites are incredible resources for court cases, but much broader in scope than the Freedom of Speech* Project. Justia.org, where users may read full cases, is an amazing website for those who already know what they’re looking for and who have enough of a foundation with legal language to parse the language of court verdicts. (In fact, Justia was the publicly available source of the court rulings in our dataset!) Oyez.org is another excellent resource, which writes legal verdicts in more accessible language and even links each case writeup to the full case text on Justia’s website. Both of these sites aim to provide access to the full range of court cases, and function best as searchable databases. Wash U’s Supreme Court Database likewise provides an impressive database of metadata for each case. Again, its lack of guidance and specific purpose can provide a potential challenge to less-initiated users. 

Another category of similar websites are those relating to free speech. Unlike the databases referenced above, most take the form of static lists. This page from the United States Courts’ website provides a simple but nuanced answer to the question, “What does free speech mean?” by pointing to different examples of protected and unprotected speech. It’s a helpful starting point, but not at all interactive or dynamic. It provides case numbers and citations but doesn’t link to any cases or further language from the cases. This general list of landmark free speech cases from the Bill of Rights Institute provides a similar list and links each case back to Oyez, but its purpose is not to be an interactive database, just a list of information. The National Constitution Center likewise provides content that lays out some of the basic ways in which First Amendment speech protections can legally be limited, but again, isn’t dynamic or interactive.

To another important point, any curated list should prompt the questions: who made it, and to what end? As the National Constitution Center’s name might suggest, they’re pretty enamored of the Constitution, unreservedly calling it “the greatest vision of human freedom in history.” Given that they also gloss over the unprotected speech verdicts of the last century with “Today, the legal protection offered by the First Amendment is stronger than ever before in our history,” it’s hard to think that the organization is interested in letting users come to independent conclusions about the sticky relationship between case law and constitutional law. The Bill of Rights Institute uses generally clear, neutral language in its list, and links to Oyez for more information, but on closer inspection… the organization was founded and continues to be funded in part by Charles Koch, notable Libertarian. The site is still full of good information, but, as with any organization financially connected to a politically active billionaire, it behooves us to consider what is and isn’t included in their curation of the subject. 

The Freedom of Speech* Project tried to avoid some of these foibles in our two-pronged approach. There’s relatively little curation to the Explore page, inviting users to explore free speech cases within whichever filters or parameters interest them most, and in the full context of 500+ cases that relate to free speech (as per the WUSTL metadata and our generous manual categorization of edge cases). The Guided page gives users a curated experience, openly acknowledging that this route provides more narrative in its presentation of the facts. We of course don’t claim to be free from bias, but our biases hopefully lean towards questioning the Court’s decisions and the way those are generally presented. (And if anyone knows any billionaires looking for a pet project, we might be interested.)

3. Audience

To cast the widest possible net when reaching potential audiences, we incorporated design and content elements that would speak directly to them. There were four general categories of people that we intended to speak to with our project; each with their own degree of educational impact.

The first is a younger audience: Grade to High School learners. Our intent is to introduce them to the concepts and terminology of legal studies. Adopting cartoon characters as “help” icons throughout the different pages endears the user to the content and humanizes the otherwise weighty subject matter. They might not come away from the web page with a comprehensive understanding of case law, but at least they can use the interactive elements to appreciate that the history of free speech in the U.S. interacts with ideas like  race, communism, and obscenity. 

The second is the adult learner who might have heard of landmark cases from the newspapers they read or podcasts they listen to, but is curious about delving further into the topic of freedom of speech. They might hear it thrown around in articles they read, but are unaware of how completely embroiled this aspect of the First Amendment has been in U.S. history. They are not particularly zealous about First Amendment rights but rather the curious mind who would appreciate the chance to delve into topics that interest them, like campaign finance or religion, and read the content of Case Laws. Our website invites them to navigate the concept of Freedom of Speech by first engaging them with their desire to educate themselves. Our Guided Experience also provides a way of looking at Landmark Cases through the lens of historical context which appeals to the history buff in them.

The third is the Law or Legal Studies student. They come to the website with an exhaustive knowledge of these rules and the precedent they set. They might be well versed in Constitutional Law as well. Our website offers an alternative way of looking at these cases which have drummed into their heads ad nauseam. We thought it useful to offer a place to explore legal history using keywords plucked from the text of the case. Our division and grouping by topic was informed by phrases from the text, then hand-picked by our team according to what we thought was most relevant. Although this way of approaching legal studies is subjective, it isn’t without merit. It is our belief that for the Law student our webpage offers an alternative way of approaching the daunting amount of cases which deal with Freedom of Speech. In a way we have humanized the case method in legal education. To better understand how principles or doctrines are furthered it is vital to see the relation between the thematic elements. Our webpage pinpoints these by Topic which gives the Law student the option to browse cases in a more intuitive way.

Finally, there are the #freedomofspeech internet advocates from both sides of party lines who would do well to become immersed in the history of the subject before parading its use all over the internet. This set of chronically online people are frequent users of Twitter and online discussion boards where hashtags related to First Amendment Rights will be able to consolidate a lot of the information they’ve been reading in piecemeal about the First Amendment from scattered articles. Our website demonstrates that Freedom of Speech has not necessarily privileged one political party over the other, and in fact many of our contemporary conflicts over what we are allowed to say in public, or the slogans we wear on our clothing have been dealt with decades ago. Cementing these disputes in history, and revealing that they don’t arise ex nihilo allows for a studied response rather than imagining we are confronted with arbitrary affronts on Free Speech. The historical precedent is crucial here and points to the worthiness of our Topic Modeling which allows people to use common phrases they might find on Twitter or newspaper articles to see how others before them have dealt with similar issues. From flag-burning to accusations of Socialism, there is precedent that should be studied before going online to hurl flippant insults.

4. Project Activities

An ambitious subject deserves a sprawling website to match and so we set out to accomplish a host of goals which we have met for the most part. The work plan consisted of a heavy load for the month of March which set up the remainder of the semester for fine-tuning and revision. A few of the accomplishments that really set the tone for the remainder of the project and allowed us to envision the course for successful implementation included: completing the lo-fi UX sketches on March 9th, getting a clean dataset, including SCOTUS decision text on 13th, having the project landing page up by the 16th, and doing a substantial amount of the text analysis & tagging by the 20th. During April we fine-tuned aspects of the webpage and began posting on social media. On the 4th, we completed the code scaffolding and on the 7th, the hi-fi (completed) UX wireframes were finished. This was also a month of heavy back-end code and bug fixing in preparation for the presentation in May. Near the end of April, the topic modeling process was complete and cases were matched with their relevant themes.

Much of the driving force behind the website stemmed from an ideation session which got everyone on the team onboard with respect to the final vision of the project. We used Discord to share updates throughout the semester which allowed us to take a peek into the creative and analytic processes of the others while offering up the chance to cheer them on. Updates on different design elements of the website gave us a structure through which to imagine the content of the project. With each newly introduced element—from the map of the USA to the empty boxes of cases constructed according to the color scheme of the website—it became easier to imagine what we were working towards. Shared screen captures of the data sets that our team was sifting through highlighted the frustrations that can arise when wrestling with code. This was exciting to see, because no adventure is complete without its momentary setbacks and eventual achievements.

5. Accomplishments

The product is a website that can be described as a Vue application with multiple “pages,” which are not actually single HTML files, but rather portions of HTML that get assembled depending on how the user interacts with the website. It gives users an overview of the limitations of First Amendment freedom of speech rights as adjusted by the Supreme Court in the 500+ cases it has heard regarding this topic over the course of American history. 

On the landing portion of the site, the project name is declared as a heading, and the project’s mascots, Gavel Gavin (a smiling, brown gavel with a block) and Aster Risk (a big blue asterisk with an angry, frowning face), bound the heading on either side. When clicked, the mascots introduce their purpose to the project. Below the heading and the mascots, there are two paths to choose from: an explore mode or a guided mode. The explore mode button has text above it that constantly shifts, giving the user a preview of the various topics that are encompassed in the corpus of First Amendment freedom of speech cases. Below the buttons is the original text of the First Amendment. The header bar is a universal feature of the site and contains a little info symbol that allows the user to click on it, which displays a modal that describes the project and our team.

 

Explore Mode

When clicking the button that says “explore,” the site loads in an interface with a sorting bar, a sidebar of filters, and a scrollable space that holds cards with case titles. When interacting with the filters, the space shows only case cards that match the indicated filter options. The filter options are: 1) a switch, which will show landmark cases when clicked; 2) another switch, which will show cases in which the right to freedom of speech was protected when clicked; 3) a range of years on which the user can click and drag their mouse to select a subset of years; and 4) a list of topics with the amount of cases which are composed of that topic in the majority. Clicking on the filter names themselves triggers a popup with a little more information on how landmark cases are determined, what protected speech means, and where the topics came from, respectively

Upon selecting from the options afforded in filter 4, the case cards will adjust to show only cases with that topic, but will also show what percentage of the case has been classified as the selected topic. The courthouse icon on the bottom left of the card indicates a landmark case, and when hovered over, will declare that it is a landmark case. Similarly, Gavel Gavin is in the bottom right and indicates cases in which the right to freedom of speech was protected. When selecting a topic, the top bar near the sorting dropdown will also populate with information about the currently selected topic.

The sorting dropdown allows users to sort the selected cards in alphabetical order, ascending or descending, or by year, ascending or descending. When a user clicks the button that says “See how the Court ruled,” a case modal will populate. Because the case modal exists in both modes, further information will be provided in a separate section.

Guided Mode

 

 

 

 

If the user clicks on the button that says “guide me through,” they will be brought to a page that contains a map of the United States that has small gavels as points on the map, a timeline with multiple light brown ticks on it, and a switch that says “Explore by era (Guided experience)”. 

If the user clicks the switch, a text box will pop up over the map, and transparent blue boxes will show up over the timeline, their widths representing the range of years in a particular era. When the user clicks on one of the boxes, they can read about that particular era. The user can also click on the previous and next buttons located on either side of the era’s description to advance the story. They can then either click the x button to close the era mode or click the switch again, which will do the same thing.

When the user hovers over a tick on the timeline, a case title, along with its relevant citation and decision year, will populate in a tooltip. Upon clicking on either a gavel on the map or a tick on the timeline, a speech bubble will pop up with a case title, the key issue in that case, and a button that says “See how the court ruled.” When clicking on that button, the user will be able to read about a landmark freedom of speech case in the aforementioned case modal, which will have its functionality explained in the next section.

Case modal

The case modal pops up when clicking a button that says “See how the court ruled,” and shows crucial information about each case. Every case starts out with the introductory sentence “In this case, speech was…” and then depending on how the court ruled, the modal will either declare “Protected” or “Not protected.” The modal will also show the title of the case, the citation, and how the court ruled. Depending on whether the case is a landmark case or a non-landmark case, there will be different levels of detail. If the case is a landmark case, there will be a key issue, case syllabus, and decision, but if the case is not classified as a landmark case, there will only be a case syllabus. Viewing cases from the Explore page will show all freedom of speech cases, while viewing cases from the Guided page will show only landmark freedom of speech cases. Upon clicking the close button in the top right hand corner, the modal will disappear, and the user will be able to go back to the mode they were inspecting.

6. Evaluation

Throughout its development, our project consistently moved through various moments of evaluation through communication with those both within and outside the Digital Humanities program; with feedback ranging from high-level questions about the intent of our work, to informal comments and conversations from and with our intended audience. In the earlier stages of our project’s development, we sought and received feedback from Micki Kaufman—Advisor to the Master of Arts in Digital Humanities Program—as well as Professor Maney from multiple angles, whereby our conversations ranged from concept ideation, to outreach, to topic modeling. When we kicked off and began brainstorming the direction of our project, Kaufman provided us with questions that allowed us to connect our desired impact and audience with the way in which we designed our product’s experience: How would we make case law accessible, and what does it look like to make something complicated (like case law) into something easy to understand? What are we trying to provoke in our users, and what questions are we looking to gesture towards? How do we communicate the relationships between different landmark cases across time and space? How do we find the fine line between being as “unbiased” as possible, while also making clear that we acknowledge and understand our own political predispositions?

Professor Maney also provided apt feedback regarding the efficacy of our project, asking questions specific to our project’s potential content, which would determine its scope: How would we determine what speech is protected in, say, 1969 vs. 2010? Will those determinations emerge from analysis of your dataset or claims made by legal scholars? If the latter, won’t we be relying on the work of reliable, established legal scholarship to guide the creation of the data visualizations instead of our layperson’s perspective? Additionally, isn’t it possible forms of speech were unevenly protected across the US at different moments? In light of these provocations, Professor Maney offered that we narrow our project’s scope if we felt it necessary, considering the potentially overwhelming breadth of information that needed to be simplified under the header of “freedom of speech.”

Through these conversations with Kaufman and Maney in the first steps of our budding project, we moved through brainstorming and design ideation with several questions at the forefront of our minds. Indeed, we attempted to answer their provocations in the design of experience in the following ways: (1) Visualizing both the temporal and spatial dimensions of different cases through our map and timeline experience; (2) visually designing our project as to make it less intimidating and more accessible through playful graphics and branding; (3) narrating how cases could be understood as connected and contingent on its historical context through our “guided era exploration”; and (4) simplifying case law descriptions by communicating the key points and ideas of a particular case. In these ways, we were able to combine both our own data analysis with the claims made by legal scholars in a way that was doable within scope, while also opening up our visualizations to interpretation from a user experience perspective.

Kaufman also provided feedback when it came to the technical aspects of our project, especially as it pertained to moments in our project’s development when data analysis and topic modeling became tricky. At this stage of our project, we were contemplating the heavy computational load of topic modeling over 500+ cases, with legitimate concern that our computers might not be able to actually perform the analysis we wanted. In light of this, Kaufman offered that we use a “representative sample” from each case–in this instance the case syllabus, which is essentially an abstract. We followed this sound advice, scraping and topic modelling just the abstracts of the cases, and as such, managed to build a topic model that could not only be run on Eva’s local machine, but which worked fast enough to facilitate multiple drafts and tweaks for better results.

Additionally, we held informal conversations for the sake of branding and social outreach, with peers and acquaintances in circles intimately familiar with legal discourse. These conversations were largely held with students in law school, who could provide us insight into how we might brand our social media and cultivate a specific humor that would be applicable and relatable to those with these interests: What are the sorts of content that law students, in particular, enjoy viewing? Were there ways we could provide with our users and viewers, such that they could submit their own content to our social media platforms? And was that something students would desire? Through these conversations, we would get ideas of different jokes/memes/content we could post on our Instagram and Twitter. From these discussions we also decided to make it possible for our users to DM us self-made memes that we could then post on our social media pages.

Lastly, our team was attentive to the feedback provided to us from the peers in class, especially when it came to the presentation of our final project. From the in-class practice runs of our Digital Humanities Showcase presentation, our group received comments regarding the way we visualized and narrated our work and process: Considering the fact that our project sought to make case law accessible, easy to understand, and un-intimidating, our presentation should mirror the way we visualized these key tenets in our user interface—through hand-drawn fonts, playful characters, and varying colors. Our peers also suggested we consider the sizing of our images, such that we could better highlight our project’s interface and experience. In light of these suggestions, we re-made our presentation to better narrate not only our UI, but also our branding, such as our Gavel Gavin and Aster Risk characters. By putting all these branding and visual elements together in a way that felt cohesive, our presentation was able to better communicate our project’s goals of making case law accessible, such that the user could better understand how the freedom of speech is used today.

7. Continuation, Future of the Project & Sustainability

It’s difficult to continue working on a project like this without another deadline! But the site would absolutely benefit from it — there are some functionality and UI issues that might be relatively easily solved and majorly impact the user experience for the better. See below for a bulleted list of our development and UX wishlist.

In terms of expansion, the scope actually seems very appropriate: freedom of speech is an important and super relevant category, and it makes sense to have an interactive web application devoted to exploring these cases. It would be great to update it with the latest cases, but otherwise, the boundaries of this project are helpful and contribute to its success. 

Web development wishlist:

  • Filters working properly, including with multiple queries at once and a “clear all filters” button
  • Improve Explore topics (/maybe ditch the topic model in favor of more manual categorization)
  • Adjust the speech bubble so that the tail actually shows up where the user clicks
  • Add in one of our mascots, Gavin, as a marker when the cases are activated in Guided mode
  • Add justices to the case modals

Content wishlist:

  • Era for the current day that addresses the social media + democracy side of free speech
  • Add the latest cases to Explore mode
  • Minor fixes in tooltips to display legal definitions

Website: https://freedom-of-speech-project.github.io/fos/

Github: https://github.com/freedom-of-speech-project/fos

Workshop: Careers at the Intersection of Education and Technology

The Careers at the Intersection of Education and Technology panel took place on May 11th, and it included professionals working in this new and in-demand field.  The event highlighted the diverse and unique positions that merge digital humanities, digital pedagogy, open education, library studies, and coding. The panelist included Barbara Hubert from Brainpop,  digital humanities fellow Erin Rose Glass, and Museum Educator Maria Janelli. These Graduate Center Alumni gave insight into working with a Ph.D. title, how much technical or educational experience one needs to work in this field, and how one might land a job that blends these two ever-changing fields.

Like lessons I’ve learned in my Digital Pedagogical courses, the alumni reiterated that one of the main rewards of this intersection between education and technology is giving students more agency and access to educational material and digital skills like coding. While at the panel, I couldn’t help but be reminded of my team’s project, Corona Chronicles. This living, breathing, student-centered archive thoughtfully curated, is a tool of access and agency for middle and high school age learners to tell their story their way.

The panel gave me comfort and confidence in all of the tools I’m learning in the digital humanities program and what the career world looks like for people with our unique and versatile set of skills and interests. Along with host Joseph Paul Hill, the panelists spoke about the demand in both the educational world and the technology/digital production world for digital humanities and digital pedagogy skills. They gave tips on how to best present our learning and praxis experiences on resumes and CVs, highlighting the nature of our projects, project management skills, design and implementation, and how we work with data.

The most important lessons from this panel were to 1. you don’t need to be an expert in both education and technology to acquire a position that merges these two fields; you have to be open to learning new capabilities and collaborating with others in your team (who are also diverse when it comes to skills). 2. When learning one software or programing language, one must also be open to teaching these to others. 3. Most importantly, one must network and maintain connections with fellow alumni, educators, and other professionals one meets along the one way. This last point is not unique to technological nor educational opportunities. Still, it is special to this intersection since you will always be learning new pedagogical and digital skills and constantly collaborate with people from a completely different background and maybe more or less experience in either education or technology.

Catchup blog #1

I think I have 5 personal blogs left to write, which pretty much coincides with having built an almost-fully functional website in the last… 3 weeks. I honestly haven’t had much to write since my topic modeling posts — the update each week is that I am neck-deep in coding, which is a state that I alternately love and hate.

I hate it because it involves hours and hours of sitting, often so engaged in a problem that I forget to move or drink water for an unreasonable amount of time. I hate it because it leaves my body restless and my brain knackered. I hate it because the emotional landscape sometimes involves great swathes of frustration with just pinpricks of triumph before I turn to the next tangled problem.

I love it, though, because it really is like learning a new language. It’s a language of functionality and precision, and of breaking the problem I want to solve down into a set of tasks that a computer can accomplish. I’ve enjoyed learning over the course of my degree that there’s rarely just one way to do that. There may be one way that’s the most performant, one that’s the most mobile-friendly, one the most visually pleasing, or one the easiest. Beyond that, there may be one way that accomplishes what you really intend and one that seems logically sound but ultimately fails (for example, select all the women in this dataset and select all the not men in this dataset are equally easy tasks for a computer but certainly not equal questions for a researcher — intention is key, as is a data structure that allows you to ask exactly the question you want).

Sometimes these different  “best ways to break down a task” overlap, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I have the knowledge and bandwidth to make an informed decision or improve on an old way of doing things, other times I’m so relieved to hack out a way that just WORKS, I don’t even think about the others. That’s definitely a plus one for collaboration, since looking at other peoples’ code often teaches me about the ways I haven’t chosen.

I love coding because I get to not only think about all of that, but actually do it. I hope it never gets old for me to write out text commands and see them bring dynamic shapes and colors and movement and information to life online.

FOS* Group Project update: crunch edition

This group project update from last week is coming in no-so-hot because we’re working hard to get everything squared away for Thursday! There may have been some scope creep, and some of us are wondering for the second year in a row what happened to April…

We met all together on Monday to finalize presentation details and discuss feedback from the class practice session. Kevin has been working hard on the presentation and a few last minute asks for the website (like a little courthouse icon to denote landmark cases). Martin has been helping with the presentation script and with some important last minute manual data work. Joanne is continuing to work on making our text data perfectly ready for web display,  as well as working on the map and timeline. And Eva is working on the sort/filter/display functions for the website’s explore page.

Personal Blog – The Home Stretch

It’s been a long, taxing journey this semester, and on some level I hope I speak for some people (although I know deep down that knowing the rest of you, very few of you probably share this with me) when I say that it took a lot out of me. Sometimes I’d give it my all, and still felt like I fell short of my goals. But, we’re nearing the end.

This week, we got down to the finishing touches. I submitted a piece regarding the differences between interpreting and analyzing rebuses as opposed to interpreting and analyzing other works, such as literature and visual art, along with an in-depth look at The Arms of the Duke of Argyll. I also submitted a very condensed version of the interpretation guide I’ve been talking about most of this semester. The final product doesn’t elaborate on the meanings of icons – rather, I rearranged the disorganized notes I had on translating symbols and figures in heraldry into other languages into a neater, more accessible form.

I’m not sure what the summer will hold for this project, especially in a personal sense. Maybe with more time on my hands, I can burrow through more texts for coats of arms. If conditions improve, maybe I’ll visit museums in person and see what there is to find. I’m sure my group members have posted about it, especially Ostap, but as you might know, museums’ digital collections are not necessarily the same as or as expansive as their physical ones.

On the subject of my group, I do want to take some time to thank them for the immense amount of amazing work they’ve done for this project. The project would never have come to fruition without Patricia’s website designing prowess, Ostap’s outreach and overall expertise in archiving, Rachel’s ability to consistently find and make use of interesting rebuses, and last but certainly not least, Bianca keeping us organized and functional. I’m not lying when I say this is one of the better and more cohesive groups I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of.