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

美国最高法院法官在每周会议上完全保密地投票，只有法官才允许参加。在这些会议上，法官们讨论，审议，并作出初步决定，他们听取了案件。大法官们在这些会议上自己做的书面笔记提供了关于他们所说的话以及由谁所说的话的唯一记录。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份数字文档，6900个案例和约1000万字。为了转录这些文件，该项目使用Zooniverse？一个由NSF资助的网络平台，让公众参与众包科学研究项目。因此，该项目直接涉及社会科学研究的公众，这将提高社会科学的一般公民的理解和内部运作的美国最高法院具体。这些数据将立即提供给不同的受众。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、记者和公众将能够轻松地使用在线档案，探索和学习大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方面的内部运作？世界上最神秘的机构？美国最高法院通过这样做，本项目将从根本上改变学术界对法院如何制定国家法律的政策的理解。

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.