Collaborative Proposal: Understanding Supreme Court Decision-making Through Conference Note Transcription

合作提案：通过会议记录转录了解最高法院的决策

• 批准号: 1556227
• 负责人: Timothy Johnson
• 金额: $ 20万
• 依托单位: University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-03-15 至 2019-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1556227&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Proposal; Understanding; Supreme; Court

U.S. Supreme Court justices cast votes in complete secrecy during weekly meetings, which only justices are allowed to attend. During these meetings, the justices discuss, deliberate, and make initial decisions on cases they have heard. The written notes the justices themselves take during these meetings provide the only record of what has been said, and by whom. This project will gather these notes from archives across the country, utilize the power of citizen-scientists to transcribe them, and, most importantly, publish them online in an archive of searchable text documents that will be widely disseminated to researchers, teachers, journalists, lawyers, and the public. The resulting data will include almost 45,000 digital documents spanning 49 years, 6900 cases, and approximately 10 million words. To transcribe these documents the project utilizes Zooniverse, an NSF funded web-based platform that engages the public in crowd-sourced scientific research projects. This project therefore directly involves the public in social scientific research, which will enhance citizen understanding of social science generally and of the inner workings of the U.S. Supreme Court specifically. These data will be immediately accessible to a diverse range of audiences. Researchers will be able to apply text analysis techniques to the computer-readable text files. Lawyers, teachers, journalists, and the general public will be able to easily use the online archive to explore and learn from what was said by justices during their secret conference discussions. Ultimately, these data will reveal the inner workings of the most secretive aspect of the federal government?s most secretive institution, the U.S. Supreme Court. In so doing, this project will fundamentally transform scholarly understanding of how the Court sets national legal policy.

美国最高法院的大法官在每周会议上完全保密，只有大法官才能参加。在这些会议期间，大法官讨论，故意并就他们听到的案件做出初步决定。书面笔记在这些会议期间所主张的书面记录提供了所说的唯一记录，以及谁。该项目将从全国各地的档案中收集这些笔记，利用公民科学家的力量来抄录它们，最重要的是，在可搜索的文本文档的档案档案中在线发布，这些文本将广泛传播给研究人员，老师，记者，律师，律师和公众。最终的数据将包括近45,000个数字文档，涉及49年，6900个案例和大约1000万个单词。为了抄录这些文件，该项目利用了一个基于NSF的基于Web的平台，该项目吸引了公众参与众包科学研究项目。因此，该项目直接涉及公众参与社会科学研究，这将增强公民对社会科学的理解，并专门对美国最高法院的内部运作。这些数据将立即访问各种各样的受众。研究人员将能够将文本分析技术应用于计算机可读的文本文件。律师，老师，记者和公众将能够轻松地使用在线档案馆探索和了解法官在秘密会议讨论中所说的话。最终，这些数据将揭示联邦政府最秘密的机构美国最高法院最秘密的方面的内部运作。这样一来，该项目将从根本上改变对法院如何制定国家法律政策的学术理解。