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.

美国最高法院法官在每周一次的会议上进行完全保密的投票，只有法官才可以参加会议。在这些会议上，法官们对他们所审理的案件进行讨论、审议并做出初步决定。法官们在这些会议期间所做的书面记录是关于发言内容和发言者的唯一记录。该项目将从全国各地的档案馆收集这些笔记，利用公民科学家的力量对其进行转录，最重要的是，将它们以可搜索文本文档的档案形式在线发布，这些文档将广泛传播给研究人员、教师、记者、律师和公众。生成的数据将包括跨越 49 年的近 45,000 份数字文档、6900 个案例和大约 1000 万字。为了转录这些文件，该项目利用了 Zooniverse，这是一个 NSF 资助的网络平台，让公众参与众包科学研究项目。因此，该项目直接让公众参与社会科学研究，这将增强公民对社会科学的总体理解，特别是对美国最高法院内部运作的理解。这些数据将立即可供各种受众访问。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、教师、记者和公众将能够轻松地使用在线档案来探索和学习法官在秘密会议讨论中所说的内容。最终，这些数据将揭示联邦政府最秘密机构——美国最高法院——的内部运作。通过这样做，该项目将从根本上改变学术界对法院如何制定国家法律政策的理解。