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

美国最高法院法官在每周的会议上完全秘密地投票，只有法官才能参加。在这些会议上，大法官们讨论、审议并对他们听到的案件做出初步裁决。法官们自己在这些会议上做的书面记录提供了唯一的记录，记录了他们说了什么，谁说的。这个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转录它们，最重要的是，将它们发布在一个可搜索的文本文件档案中，并将其广泛传播给研究人员、教师、记者、律师和公众。由此产生的数据将包括跨越49年的近45,000份数字文件，6900个案例，大约1000万字。为了转录这些文件，该项目利用了Zooniverse，这是一个由美国国家科学基金会资助的基于网络的平台，让公众参与众包的科学研究项目。因此，该项目直接让公众参与社会科学研究，这将提高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。这些数据将立即提供给各种各样的受众。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、教师、记者和普通公众将能够轻松地使用在线档案来探索和了解法官在秘密会议讨论期间所说的话。最终，这些数据将揭示联邦政府最隐秘的内部运作方式。美国最隐秘的机构——美国最高法院。这样做，这个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。

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.