I've been invited to Carnegie Mellon to attend an NSF-sponsored workshop about how we can use the data available from Supreme Court Oral Argument. This grows out of a broad expansion of the The Oyez Project (which has been substantially updated so check it out).
The goal of the workshop is to get information from invited scholars in a number of fields (law professors, linguists, computer scientists, psychologists) about how to use oral argument data. The data now available are XML-formatted transcripts of all Supreme Court oral arguments between 1979 and 2005, along with the associated audio recordings. This format, using ProjectPad and Plone software, will allow for the creation of a structured codeable database for SCOTUS Oral Argument where coded categories can be exported into tab delimited files. These audio/transcript formatted transcripts are aligned to the sentence/word level for arguments from 2000-2005.
This electronic database has been produced by the efforts of the Principal Investigators: Jerry Goldman (Political Science, Northwestern), Mark Liberman (Linguistics & Computer Science, Penn), Timothy Johnson (Political Science, Minnesota), and Brian MacWhinney (Psychology & Linguistics, Carnegie Mellon). For more information on the data, contact Jerry Goldman.
UPDATE: Check out this great post by Mark Liberman over at Language Log that references the workshop and has some fun with Justice Co-Voting Percentages.
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