This week the theme of the FOS* group was concretization. Because our team works in Discord channels where everyone routinely posts their latest successes, it’s fun to see things come to realization step-by-step. For example, in order to make the Topics more consistent in the Topic Modeling scheme Eva took out justice names and other common stopwords. Joanne posted about how she was able to get a “protected speech” variable by splitting the data set, then shared what that logic looks like in code! The Figma software adopted by Kevin as the de-facto way to share design work has been a fantastic resource for seeing the evolution of the wireframes and how the comments we made have influenced the shape of the website. And I made stickers of our Project mascot 🙂

Eva and Joanne have been working on getting the Topic Models finalized, which involves running the syllabi to see if reliable categories emerge. Knowing how to “chunk” this information is part of the art + science of the methodology. Having “better” or “worse” topics relies a bit on subject area knowledge but also a general understanding of what kind of text can be grabbed for the software. 

Kevin took our comments on his whiteboard designs, and together we cemented the flow of the website. In tandem with Eva and Joanne, the code Scaffolding page is slowly being fleshed out with lines of code. It’s exciting to get a behind the scenes look at the machinery that will eventually drive the website. 

I will begin posting “educational” style social media posts, in addition to reaching out to law and meme accounts to see if they might potentially be able to start liking our posts. Eva has been sharing with us interesting papers and organizations with contacts we could potentially reach out to. I have begun doing that as well.

We routinely meet every weekend and at least once during the week as a group. Smaller co-working meetings are also held when 2 members have something to advise each other on.

Some things to work on include:

• Qualitative research of topic models.
• Creation of web copy including terminology like Precedent and Tests.
• Formalize the Guided vs. Exploratory format of the website.