Data Update No. 2
Welcome to Data Update No. 2 from the Justice Data and Design Lab (JDD Lab) at ACE!
The JDD Lab is based at the Access to Justice Centre for Excellence (ACE) at the University of Victoria. At the Lab, Director Kate Gower works with a team of graduate students from the faculties of law and data science. They have found new data on British Columbians’ legal needs on the social media site, Reddit1. They use unsupervised machine learning to learn more about people’s legal needs.
Data Update No. 2 gives you access to the results of the JDD Lab’s analysis of the Reddit data gathered up to February 2024.
In this update, we do two things:
We answer a question people asked about the Data Updates
What is the “slide to adjust relevance” at the top of the interactive display? What should I set it at and why?
What to do: We recommend you adjust the slide and set Relevance at “0.6”2.
Why: In the interactive display, “Relevance” is a based on two things: first, the chance of a term only appearing in a certain cluster and second, the chance of a term appearing in the whole dataset.
- If you adjust the slide and set Relevance at “1.0”, then the list of terms starts with the term in each cluster that appears the most in the whole dataset.
- If you adjust the slide and set Relevance at “0.0”, then the list of terms starts with the terms that appear only in this cluster.
- If you set Relevance to “0.6” then you get a list of terms slightly weighted towards how much the term appears in the whole dataset.
Research shows that the list of terms provided by setting Relevance to “0.6” gives you the best change to judging what that cluster is about. Cool, right?
We share the next Interactive Display
Below is the data showing the legal problems people in BC are asking for help with on Reddit as of February 2024.
Set Relevance to “0.6”. Set it to something else and see the difference. Play around with all the things you can click on in the interactive display.
We recommend using Google Chrome for optimal compatibility. However, Safari should also work seamlessly. Note that the interactive display does not work on smaller screen. If you are using a mobile phone, consider rotating your phone.
With Relevance set to “0.6”, here are the top terms in each cluster:
| Cluster 5 | employee | employer | hour | contract | employment | working |
| Cluster 4 | account | payment | bank | estate | credit | debt |
| Cluster 3 | car | insurance | vehicle | stratum | ICBC | cost |
| Cluster 2 | tenant | lease | unit | tenancy | apartment | building |
Learn more about the JDD Lab’s work in UVIC’s video of a Dean’s Lecture on the Lab, and at ACE’s website.
We are grateful for the support of the Law Foundation of BC and Mitacs. We could not do this work without them.
- The most recent Everyday Legal Needs survey undertaken by Statistics Canada in 2021 shows that most people take action to resolve their everyday legal problems, and the top two things most people do are to ask their family and friends and to look on the internet. The JDD Lab used programs that show where people go online when they look for legal advice and found that the top place people go is to the social media platform Reddit. ↩︎
- For more information see: Carson Sievert and Kenneth E. Shirley, “LDAvis: A method for visualizing and interpreting topics” (2014) Proceedings of the Workshop on Interactive Language Learning, Visualization, and Interfaces, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, June 27 at 67, online: The Stanford Natural Language Processing Group https://nlp.stanford.edu/events/illvi2014/papers/sievert-illvi2014.pdf. ↩︎