(to REFERENCES)

Cousins, K., S. Pearson-Merkowitz, et al. (2005). Patterns of Judicial Influence: Tracking Regulatory Takings Policy in the Lower Federal Courts . Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC.

"The CITE-IT project employs information technologies in innovative ways to investigate the development and dissemination of precedent in the American legal system, based on a study of the issue of “regulatory takings.” This manuscript describes the initial phases of this multidisciplinary project, specifically the methodologies we have developed to identify the corpus on which the study itself will build – all federal-level regulatory takings decisions following the 1978 Penn Central Supreme Court decision. While a comprehensive, clearly identified collection of decisions – pertinent to a single area of law – presents a great resource for legal scholars, defining such a collection is in fact quite challenging. Using a combination of conventional research techniques and computer automation, we identified 2,780 decisions, of which approximately 68 percent were found to be pertinent to regulatory takings law. We then developed query strategies that “triangulate” across multiple search results to isolate “true” regulatory takings decisions within that pool (thus reducing Boundary Specification Error). Formatting features common to all decisions enabled us to automatically extract additional data (e.g., formal citation, court location, date, decisions cited), which were converted to graphical form (as well as more formal metrics for further analysis). This manuscript describes these processes, as well as a review of the scholarship on precedent and citation analysis, and a summary of the history of regulatory takings. We conclude with our future research goals, including expanding this pool to include all federal cases since 1922, as well as all relevant decisions handed down by the state supreme courts."

McIntosh, W, K Cousins, J Rose, S Simon, M Evans, Kimberly Karnes, John McTague, and Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz (2005). " Using Information Technology to Examine the Communication of Precedent: Initial Findings and Lessons from the CITE-IT Project ." Presented at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Oakland, CA (March 17-19)

"The CITE-IT project employs information technologies in innovative ways to investigate the development and dissemination of precedent in the American legal system, based on a study of the issue of “regulatory takings.” This manuscript describes the initial phases of this multidisciplinary project, specifically the methodologies we have developed to identify the corpus on which the study itself will build – all federal-level regulatory takings decisions following the 1978 Penn Central Supreme Court decision. While a comprehensive, clearly identified collection of decisions – pertinent to a single area of law – presents a great resource for legal scholars, defining such a collection is in fact quite challenging, and has rarely (if ever) been attempted. Using a combination of conventional research techniques and computer automation, we identified 2,780 decisions, triangulating across multiple search approaches to identify “best candidates” for the pool. By exploiting formatting patterns across these decision texts, we then automatically extracted additional data from each (e.g., formal citation, court location, date, and prior decisions cited), which we then converted to graphical form (as well as more formal metrics for further analysis). This manuscript describes these processes, as well as a review of the scholarship on precedent and citation analysis, and a summary of the history of regulatory takings. We conclude with our future research goals, including expanding this pool to include all federal cases since 1922, as well as all relevant decisions handed down by the state supreme courts."

Shneiderman, Ben, and Aleks Aris. " Network Visualization by Meaningful Substrates ." Paper presented at the 8th International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, Venice, Italy, May 23-27 2006.

"Networks have remained a challenge for information visualization designers because of the complex issues of node and link layout coupled with the rich set of tasks that users present. This paper offers a five-layer hierarchy of network visualization situations with associated tasks: from simple node and link situations to more elaborate situations involving node labels, directed links, node attributes, and link attributes. Then, it offers a strategy based on tying node placement to node attributes within nonoverlapping regions. These user-defined meaningful substrates enable users to easily see which links remain within a region or cross to other regions. Link visibility is controlled by check boxes so that selected subsets of links can be displayed. To further limit display clutter, users can set sliders to control which nodes within a region have their edges visible. We illustrate our meaningful substrate approach in a modest example with legal precedents for 49 cases with 368 precedents, and show these in our implementation of NVMS 1.0."

Thorpe, Rebecca, and Michael Evans. " Beyond the Double Standard: Comparing US Supreme Court Decision Making in Property and Civil Rights Cases ." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 19-23 2006.

"How is Supreme Court decision-making different in property and civil rights cases? To address this question, we develop and test several hypotheses about distinctive amicus participation and judicial opinion bargaining/voting patterns in regulatory takings and affirmative action cases from 1978 to 2003. We present evidence - variation in overall amicus participation over time, differences in group representation, significant differences in average winning coalition sizes and in the number of opinions generated per case, and disparate levels of judicial voting polarization - consistent with the theory that agents approach issues differently depending upon the extent to which they can easily associate deep prior value commitments and clearly conceived instrumental beliefs to issues."

THESIS PROPOSALS

Aris, A (2006). Network Visualization by Semantic Substrates . Ph.D. Research Proposal and Reading Lists, Computer Science. College Park, MD, University of Maryland: 47

"Network visualization and graph drawing research has concentrated on improving the visual organization of nodes and links according to graph drawing aesthetics. Although these approaches improve layouts in terms of minimization of link crossings, the longest link length, and other such criteria, these do not always lead to comprehensible layouts. This proposal focuses on placing nodes according to their attributes, which is an interpretable node placement rule that conveys information about the nodes. The author believes that this will increase the comprehensibility of a network. Another room for improvement arises when there are too many links to draw. To improve comprehensibility, the author proposes new approaches based on (1) user controlled visibility of links and (2) novel linkviz methods, which avoid drawing links. The proposal applies the interpretable node placement rule in a practical and conceivable form: semantic substrates. A semantic substrate is a template that defines the placement of nodes. This template consists of rectangular regions in which nodes are placed according to their attribute values. The semantic substrate idea is applied to an example network dataset of precedent patterns, where 2780 nodes represent court cases and 16,000+ links represent citations. This dataset has been explored by NVSS 1.0, a Java program that was implemented by the author. The proposed work consists of pushing this idea from the prototypical example to a more general form, where other datasets can be visualized this way. The plan includes a substrate editor for users to create their own substrates in order to leverage their experiences and understanding, enabling them to express the representation in their mind. Furthermore, features such as overview and interactive filtering are considered for scalability. Evaluation is proposed in the form of case studies to confirm benefits and obtain feedback, especially about semantic substrates, linkviz methods, and the interactive features. The contributions of this research will be: (1) design principles for semantic substrates, linkviz methods, and user interaction, (2) software and algorithms that implement the ideas, and (3) a summary of case studies illustrating the experience of the use in application domains. The outcome will also include insights, suggestions, and ideas for future work that potentially could benefit designers, developers, and researchers."