22% of U.S. Internet Users Access Legislation Online: Pew Government Online Report

22% of U.S. Internet users recently surveyed said they had “[d]ownload[ed] or read the text of any legislation” online in the past 12 months, according to Government Online: The Internet Gives Citizens New Paths to Government Services and Information (27 April 2010), a new report published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

The report also provided U.S. demographic data respecting online use of legislation in the preceding 12 months:

• 26% of male Internet users said they had “[d]ownload[ed] or read the text of any legislation” online;
• 18% of female Internet users said they had “[d]ownload[ed] or read the text of any legislation” online;
• 26% of White Internet users said they had “[d]ownload[ed] or read the text of any legislation” online;
• 11% of Black Internet users said they had “[d]ownload[ed] or read the text of any legislation” online;
• 11% of Hispanic Internet users said they had “[d]ownload[ed] or read the text of any legislation” online.

Those with an interest in citizens’ online participation in lawmaking may also wish to take note of the report’s findings respecting citizens’ communication with government online, and participation in online policy discussion: 23% of U.S. Internet users reporting having posted a comment on a government social media site or having “posted comments or interacted with others online around government policies or public issues” in the previous 12 months. Here are details:

• “12% of [I]nternet users joined a group online that tries to influence government policies”;
• 11% of “[I]nternet users … posted comments, queries or other information related to government policies online”;
• “7% of [I]nternet users uploaded videos or photos online related to a government policy or issue”;
• “3% [of Internet users] participated in an online town hall meeting”;
• “2% of all [I]nternet users … commented on the blog of a government official or agency”;
• 1% of all Internet users “posted comments on [a government] agency’s fan page or profile”.

According to the report’s methodology section, the telephone survey of U.S. residents was conducted from 30 November through 27 December 2009, and the data respecting Internet users have a margin of error of plus or minus 3%.

For more information, please see the full report.

Knight on KF Modified and the Classification of Canadian Common Law

F. Tim Knight of Osgoode Hall Law Library has published KF Modified and the Classification of Canadian Common Law, 34 Canadian Law Library Review no. 5 (2009).

Here is the abstract:

This article was inspired by a previous article written by Vincent DeCaen in an earlier issue of CLLR. It explores classification, the different approaches taken by KF Modified and LC Class KE, and the role KF Modified has had in organizing collections in Canadian law libraries. It argues that there is no right or wrong way to classify legal resources and suggests that KF Modified can benefit cataloguing workflow and is well suited to both the Canadian and common law library environments.

LEX 2010 Summer School: Managing Legal Resources in the Semantic Web

Registration is now open for the LEX 2010 Summer School: Managing Legal Resources in the Semantic Web (formerly the Legislative XML Summer School), to be held 6-11 September 2010, at the University of Bologna’s campus in Ravenna, Italy.

The summer school lasts 6 days and “is organized in two courses:”

• “A Basic Course providing an introduction to XML web technologies and to basic technologies for drafting and managing standard-compliant legislative and legal documents;
• “An Advanced Course providing in-depth analysis of the higher levels of Semantic Web technologies and of their application to the legal domain: modelling of modifications, procedures and legal knowledge.”

Click here for the brochure.

The event’s sponsors include:

• Università di Bologna;
• The Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam;
• Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione Giuridica (ITTIG-CNR);
• The European University Institute;
• Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Institute of Law and Technology.

The site also lists articles and publications that will be discussed during the course, including:

• M. Biasiotti, E. Francesconi, M. Palmirani, G. Sartor, F. Vitali: Legal Informatics and Management of Legislative Documents;
• Enrico Francesconi: RDF and Semantic Mark-up of Legislative Texts (Bibliography);
• Monica Palmirani: Practical Legal Drafting. Guidelines for Africa;
• Daniela Tiscornia: The Lois Project: Lexical Ontologies for Legal Information Sharing.

Further, the site links to valuable resources on:

• the Semantic Web;
• Legal XML;
• standards and projects respecting Legal XML and the legal Semantic Web.

For more information, please see the event Website.

HT Professor Monica Palmirani.

New on VoxPopuLII: Zimmermann on jurMeta: A New Metadata Initiative for Legal Documents

Dipl.-Jur. Felix Zimmermann of kjur.de has posted jurMeta – New Metadata Initiative for Legal Documents, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

Mr. Zimmermann’s post describes jurMeta, an innovative new metadata standard — still in development — for German-language legal resources. He relates how he and his collaborators — Andreas Bock and Ralf Zosel — identified the need for a metadata standard — which German government entities, as well as private sector publishers, could employ — to enable automatic metadata extraction from, and automatic annotation of, digital legal documents, and automatic linking of such documents across platforms. He discusses their initial outline of such a standard in a 2009 conference presentation. He identifies a number of innovative free German-language legal Web 2.0 services now available. He offers an exciting use case, involving seamless linking of resources among legal Web 2.0 services. He then provides examples of the tags — which are based on Dublin Core terms — employed in the standard, in HTML and XML markup. He concludes by discussing the possibility of developing a microformat for the standard and of making the standard available in RDF.

Mr. Zimmermann’s post recalls other current legal informatics projects that apply Dublin Core metadata, including:

• The LII‘s OAI4Courts and Suggested Metadata Practices for Legislation and Regulations;
• John Joergensen‘s metadata for legislative documents and law journal articles; and
• Prof. Dr. Maarten Marx‘s metadata for parliamentary documents.

Mr. Zimmermann’s post also brings to mind Olivier Charbonneau‘s recent proposal for an automatic linking system between legal Web 2.0 services, and Ivan Mokanov‘s recent description of CanLII’s partial implementation of such a system.

Mr. Zimmermann’s post will be of interest to all those who publish law in digital formats, those developing systems for the reuse of legal information, the legal Web 2.0 community, and participants in the legal open government data movement.

A Visualization of the Marbury v. Madison Citation Network, from Computational Legal Studies

Daniel Martin Katz, Michael Bommarito, and Jonathan Zelner, all of the University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems, and Professor James H. Fowler of the University of California San Diego Department of Political Science, have posted Six Degrees of Marbury v. Madison : A Sink Based Visualization, at Computational Legal Studies. The authors provide this explanation:

[S]inks are the root to which a given legal concept, academic idea or patent based innovation can be drawn. From each citation in a non-sink node, it is possible to trace the chains of citations back to their root (which we call a sink). In the visualization above, the root or sink node is the famed United States Supreme Court decision Marbury v. Madison. Starting from the center and working out to the edge, the first ring are cases that directly cite Marbury v. Madison. The next ring are cases which cite cases that cite Marbury v. Madison. The next ring are cases which cite cases which cases that cite Marbury v. Madison and so on…

The authors continue:

[O]ne of the major contributions of the Distance Measures for Dynamic Citation Networks paper is that it allows us to use these sinks to create pairwise distance/similarity measure between the ith and jth unit. In this instance, the units in this directed acyclic network are the ith and jth decisions of the United States Supreme Court.

For more information, please see the post, and the authors’ related paper, Distance Measures for Dynamic Citation Networks.

Kinnaird, Romero, & Abowd on Connect 2 Congress: Visual Analytics for Civic Oversight

Peter Kinnaird, Mario Romero, and Professor Gregory Abowd, all of the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, have posted Connect 2 Congress: Visual Analytics for Civic Oversight, a paper presented at CHI 2010: The 28th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, held 10-15 April 2010, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Here is the abstract:

Strong representative democracies rely on educated, informed, and active citizenry to provide oversight of the government. We present Connect 2 Congress (C2C), a novel, high temporal-resolution and interactive visualization of legislative behavior. We present the results of focus group and domain expert interviews that demonstrate how different stakeholders use C2C for a variety of investigative activities. The evaluation provided evidence that users are able to support or reject claims made by candidates and conduct freeform, low-cost, exploratory analysis into the legislative behavior of representatives across time periods.

Click here for more information on Connect 2 Congress.

Danner on Law Librarians, Legal Scholarship, and Access to the Law

Senior Associate Dean Richard A. Danner of the Duke University School of Law is giving a presentation entitled Taming Multiplicity in the Post-Print Era: Law Librarians, Legal Scholarship, and Access to the Law, today, 29 April 2010, at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

The Twitter hashtag for the presentation is #danner.

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the presentation.

Click here for Dean John Palfrey’s liveblog of the presentation.

Audio (and possibly video also) of the presentation should be available shortly here.

Click here for the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship.

Tweets from Legal IT 2010 Now Archived

Twitter tweets from Legal IT 2010: The Law + Information Technology Conference, held 26-27 April 2010 in Montréal, Québec, Canada, have now been archived here on TwapperKeeper.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #legalit2010.

Click here for the conference program.

Marx & Schuth on DutchParl: The Parliamentary Documents in Dutch

Professor Dr. Maarten Marx and Anne Schuth, both of the Universiteit van Amsterdam Informatics Institute, will present a paper entitled DutchParl: The Parliamentary Documents in Dutch, at LREC 2010: The 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, to be held 17-23 May 2010 in Malta. The DutchParl corpus is available here. Here is the abstract of the paper:

A corpus called DutchParl is created which aims to contain all digitally available parliamentary documents written in the Dutch language. The first version of DutchParl contains documents from the parliaments of The Netherlands, Flanders and Belgium. The corpus is divided along three dimensions: per parliament, scanned or digital documents, written recordings of spoken text and others. The digital collection contains more than 800 million tokens, the scanned collection more than 1 billion. All documents are available as UTF-8 encoded XML files with extensive metadata in Dublin Core standard. The text itself is divided into pages which are divided into paragraphs. Every document, page and paragraph has a unique URN which resolves to a web page. Every page element in the XML files is connected to a facsimile image of that page in PDF or JPEG format. We created a viewer in which both versions can be inspected simultaneously. The corpus is available for download in several formats. The corpus can be used for corpus-linguistic and political science research, and is suitable for performing scalability tests for XML information systems.

Thanks to Professor Dr. Marx for this information.

Video Available for Duke Law.gov Workshop

Video is now available at Internet Archive (scroll down), and on YouTube from the Duke Law.gov Workshop, held earlier today, 28 April 2010 at The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at the Duke University School of Law in Durham, North Carolina, USA.

Click here for the conference program.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lawgov (scroll to tweets from April 28, 2010).

Click here for Twitter tweets from the conference (scroll to April 28, 2010).

Click here for information about Law.gov.

[This post last updated 10 May 2010.]