Data Update No. 3
Welcome to Data Update No. 3 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. 3 gives you access to the results of the JDD Lab’s analysis of the Reddit data gathered up to March 2024.
With Relevance set to “0.6”, here are the top terms in each March cluster:
| Cluster 5 | tenant | unit | lease | apartment | tenancy | building |
| Cluster 4 | child | parent | mother | mom | dad | father |
| Cluster 3 | employer | employee | hour | contract | working | manager |
| Cluster 2 | payment | account | bank | stratum | credit | business |
Compare that to the top terms in the February clusters, which were:
| 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 |
A Top Tip: The smaller a cluster is, the less word distribution there is, suggesting more cohesiveness and connectedness between the words in the cluster. In our results, Cluster 5 is the smallest red circle, Cluster 4 is slightly larger, Cluster 3 slightly larger again etc.
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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. ↩︎