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Daily Archives: August 7, 2017

The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice

Funk, Kellen R. and Mullen, Lincoln A., The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice (July 12, 2017). American Historical Review (February 2018). Available at SSRN: https:/srn.com/abstract=3001377

“In the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of U.S. states adopted a novel code of legal practice for their civil courts. Legal scholars have long recognized the influence of the New York lawyer David Dudley Field on American legal codification, but tracing the influence of Field’s code of civil procedure with precision across some 30,000 pages of statutes is a daunting task. By adapting methods of digital text analysis to observe text reuse in legal sources, this article provides a methodological guide to show how the evolution of law can be studied at a macro level—across many codes and jurisdictions—and at a micro level—regulation by regulation. Applying these techniques to the Field Code and its emulators, we show that by a combination of creditors’ remedies the code exchanged the rhythms of agriculture for those of merchant capitalism. Archival research confirmed that the spread of the Field Code united the American South and American West in one Greater Reconstruction. Instead of just a national political development centered in Washington, we show that Reconstruction was also a state-level legal development centered on a procedure code from the Empire State of finance capitalism.”

Are you being sarcastic in your Tweets – new algorithm can discern your intent

“We use millions of texts on Twitter containing emojis for training a deep learning model that understands many nuances of how language is used to express emotions. For instance, it does well at capturing sarcasm and slang. We beat state-of-the-art algorithms across many benchmarks datasets. See our paper, blog post or FAQ for more details.… Continue Reading

USGS – Protected Areas Data Portal

“The Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) was recently highlighted on the U.S. Geological Survey website. Mapping Public Lands in the United States describes this growing database containing more than three billion public land and marine acres managed by nearly 15,100 agencies and nongovernmental organizations,  and covering 200,000 separate parks and protected areas. PAD-US is a product… Continue Reading

GAO Report on increasing deployment of DOD biometrics and forensics

DOD Biometrics and Forensics: Progress Made in Establishing Long-term Deployable Capabilities, but Further Actions Are Needed, GAO-17-580: Published: Aug 7, 2017. Publicly Released: Aug 7, 2017. “The Department of Defense (DOD) has validated its requirements for long-term deployable biometric capabilities (such as fingerprint collection devices) and forensic capabilities (such as expeditionary laboratories). Biometric capabilities are… Continue Reading

Residents in Three Out of Four Counties in U.S. Now Before Immigration Court

“The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University has just released a brand new web mapping application that allows the public to examine for the very first time the number of individuals residing in each state, county, and local community within a county, who have pending cases before the Immigration Court. The level of… Continue Reading

Axios – Visualizing the Flow of Goods Across America

“This map shows the flow of all domestic freight between states in 2015 using data from the Freight Analysis Framework, which is a comprehensive accounting of all commercial freight movement between states by all modes of transportation. This includes freight moved by trucks, trains, planes and pipelines, but excludes foreign imports and exports and freights… Continue Reading