Curtotti and McCreath on Enhancing the Visualization of Law

Michael Curtotti and Dr. Eric McCreath, both of Australian National University Research School of Computer Science, presented a paper entitled Enhancing the Visualization of Law, at LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference, 9 October 2012, at the Legal Information Institute, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.

Here is the abstract:

This paper reviews the state of the art in online visualization of legislation. It reviews practice, particularly in public good and official sites. The review establishes a considerable diversity of practice but an absence of an apparent best practice. Drawing on information visualization and knowledge visualization, the paper discusses the need for a theoretical framework for legislative visualization and for evaluation. Work on the visualization of definitions is presented.

Click here for other papers, abstracts, and resources from the conference.

Bruce Reports on LVI 2012 Workshop on Open Scientific Publishing and Communication on Law and ICT

A Workshop on Open Scientific Publishing and Communication on Law and ICT was held 10 October 2012 in Ithaca, New York, immediately following LVI 2012: The Law via the Internet Conference, held 7-9 October 2012, at the Legal Information Institute (LII), Cornell Law School, Ithaca, New York, USA. The workshop had the informal title of “Steve the Librarian.” Tom Bruce of the LII sends the following report on the workshop. Thanks to Tom for allowing me to repost his report:

Since I ended up acting as the informal “chair” of the meeting, I suppose I should be the one to fill everyone in. It was, in fact, a meeting of 8 or 10 people around a breakfast table at the Holiday Inn, and not a workshop in any ordinary sense. But it was the latest event in a chain of discussions around this subject that began at LVI in Florence, and continued through the LVI meetings in Durban and Hong Kong, sometimes in conference sessions, sometimes in the FALM business meetings, and sometimes in airport lounges. It is fair to say that this is a recurring topic and an important one.

We outlined three major needs in the field.

One (which I’ve pushed to the point of being a broken record on the subject) is the need for low-threshold, internal communication among the various subdisciplines that touch open access to law. We’ve taken on some of that in VoxPopulii, first under your capable leadership and now with Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger at the helm. It’s vitally necessary that legal informatics researchers learn about the needs of publishers, publishers about librarians, librarians about informatics, and social scientists about all of them (not a complete census but you see what I mean) and that the resulting literature be accessible to non-specialists in the field that is talking about itself. There is room for much more than VoxPopuLii here.

A second is for a publishing venue for people who are working on open access to legal information as researchers in various fields, particularly younger scholars. If you can agree for a moment that we might describe their fields as, for the most part, “law and…” fields, then the journals they now have available to them are all in the fields that are on the other side of the three dots. This has a distorting effect. The availability of very good open-journal software for electronic publication makes good alternatives possible. There is general agreement that because there are so many fields bordering what we all do there is a potentially difficult problem of defining boundaries for such a journal. Initial forays will thus focus pretty tightly on open access to law. Even that is potentially tricky, given that government information of many kinds might be eligible and useful, so firm editorial leadership is called for.

A third is for a comprehensive archive and index to existing work in the field, to be maintained as new stuff is added. One might describe its boundaries as being “all the stuff Rob Richards posts about” , with substantial work on mapping it having been done by you both in formal bibliographies and in blog posts and Twitter. We think there is the possibility of working either with an existing apparatus such as the physics arXiv, or with a purpose-built DSpace installation or some other repository.

Participants in the discussion included Pompeu Casanovas, Graham Greenleaf, Enrico Francesconi, Ginevra Peruginelli, James Lambert, John Heywood, Cicely Wilson, John Joergensen, Amy Taylor, and others whose names I apologize for not retrieving from my faulty memory.

Various individuals have been tasked with pursuing initial steps toward these objectives with the aim of having all or part in place by the time of the next LVI conference (tentatively believed to be in September 2013). We’ll post news as things become concrete.

Archived Tweets and Resources from LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

Click here for archived Twitter tweets, in .csv format, from LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference, held 7-9 October 2012 at the Legal Information Institute, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.

Click here for the conference Website.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lvi2012, and the Twitter account for the conference is @LVI2012.

Click here for the conference program and abstracts of presentations.

Some conference sessions will be livestreamed here.

For blog posts and other resources related to the conference, please see the comments to this post.

Masters on CourtCloud: A New Repository for Court Opinions

Elmer Masters of CALI introduced a new technology called CourtCloud today in a presentation at LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference.

Here is a description of CourtCloud from the service’s Website:

• CourtCloud is a repository for court opinions.
• Only the court can upload documents to CourtCloud.
• Save word processor files in the desktop CourtCloud folder.
• Saved word processor files are copied to the CourtCloud server.
• CourtCloud processes the document creating PDF, HTML, and XML versions.
• The files are stored in the court’s CourtCloud folder.
• Original file + PDF, HTML, XML versions are available on the desktop and archived on the server.
• There is no direct public access to CourtCloud.
• Opinions saved to CourtCloud are added to the Free Law Reporter
• Free Law Reporter provides powerful searching and public API for access.

Click here for Twitter tweets about the presentation.

October 7-9: LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

LVI 2012: The 25th Law via the Internet Conference, is being held 7-9 October 2012, at the Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School, in Ithaca, New York, USA.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lvi2012, and the Twitter account for the conference is @LVI2012.

Click here for archived Twitter tweets, in .csv format, from the conference.

Click here for the conference program and abstracts of presentations.

Some conference sessions will be livestreamed here.

Bruce on Fostering Dialogue Between the Different Parts of the Legal Informatics Community

Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School has posted What we want from LVI2012, on his b-screeds blog.

In this post, Tom describes his goals for the upcoming conference LVI 2012: The 2012 Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 7-9 October 2012 at Cornell Law School in Ithaca, New York, USA.

Tom refers to his 2009 post entitled Big World, in which he described various components of the legal informatics field, noted that many of these components were not in regular communication with each other, and identified several reasons for this lack of dialogue and coordination.

In his new post, Tom explains how the LVI 2012 Conference has been designed to overcome these communication and coordination barriers, and to foster dialogue and cooperation among members of the many different parts of the legal informatics community.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Accepted Presentations for LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

The accepted presentations and their abstracts have been posted for LVI 2012: The 25th Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 7-9 October 2012, at Cornell University Law School in Ithaca, New York, USA.

April 2 Extended Call Deadline: LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

A call for papers and presentations — with extended submission deadline of 2 April 2012 — has been issued for LVI 2012: The Law via the Internet Conference — the international conference of the legal information institutes and the free-access-to-law community — to be held October 7-9, 2012 at Cornell Law School in Ithaca, New York.

Papers and presentations are invited respecting the following tracks:

• Track 1: The Promise and Reality of e-Participation
• Track 2: The Business of (Open) Legal Publishing
• Track 3: Free Law and Government Policy
• Track 4: Application Development for Open Access and Engagement
• Track 5: Data Organization and Legal Informatics

For more information, please see the complete call.

HT @LIICornell.

March 15 deadline: Call for Papers and Presentations: LVI 2012: The Law via the Internet Conference

A call for papers and presentations — with submission deadline of 15 March 2012 — has been issued for LVI 2012: The Law via the Internet Conference — the international conference of the legal information institutes and the free-access-to-law community — to be held October 7-9, 2012 at Cornell Law School in Ithaca, New York.

Papers and presentations are invited respecting the following tracks:

• Track 1: The Promise and Reality of e-Participation
• Track 2: The Business of (Open) Legal Publishing
• Track 3: Free Law and Government Policy
• Track 4: Application Development for Open Access and Engagement
• Track 5: Data Organization and Legal Informatics

For more information, please see the complete call.

HT @LIICornell.

Call for Papers and Presentations: LVI 2012: The Law via the Internet Conference

A call for papers and presentations — with submission deadline of 15 March 2012 — has been issued for LVI 2012: The Law via the Internet Conference — the international conference of the legal information institutes and the free-access-to-law community — to be held October 7-9, 2012 at Cornell Law School in Ithaca, New York.

Papers and presentations are invited respecting the following tracks:

• Track 1: The Promise and Reality of e-Participation
• Track 2: The Business of (Open) Legal Publishing
• Track 3: Free Law and Government Policy
• Track 4: Application Development for Open Access and Engagement
• Track 5: Data Organization and Legal Informatics

For more information, please see the complete call.

HT @LIICornell.