Data Update No. 4
Welcome to Data Update No. 4 from the Justice Data and Design Lab (JDD Lab)!
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.
This update gives you access to the results of the JDD Lab’s analysis of the Reddit data gathered up to April 2024.
In this update, we do two things:
1. We share the data in a new way!
We used to deliver the Data Update and its interactive display as an attachment. However, many company firewalls stopped our data updates because the firewall saw the attachment as a high risk of being a virus. Now the JDD Lab website is up and running, we can simply include a hyperlink to this page.
Why does this matter? This means more people can access our data updates. They can click a link in their email, arrive at this page and start exploring our data.
Remember: Set the Relevance slider at the top right of the interactive display to “0.6”. Research shows this gives you the best chance of identifying what the clusters are about.
JDD Lab – Interactive Cluster Report – April 2024:
2. We ponder what the data clusters show us, and ask for your help!
Below, we share what we see in the data clusters above. We would love you to share with us what you see. Do you have any questions we can answer?
As of April 30, the JDD Lab has over 3600 Reddit posts where British Columbians ask for help with their everyday legal problems. We have shared data and clusters for February, March and April 2024. With the relevance slider set to 0.6, here are the top terms for those three months.
| 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 |
| 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 |
| Cluster 5 | employer | employee | hour | employment | working | contract |
| Cluster 4 | tenant | lease | unit | building | apartment | tenancy |
| Cluster 3 | car | payment | signed | sale | cost | fee |
| Cluster 2 | child | parent | mom | mother | dad | account |
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. ↩︎