Data Update No. 5
Here is Data Update No. 5 from the Justice Data and Design Lab (JDD Lab)!
The JDD Lab’s goal is to collect and analyze person-centred data and user experience to improve British Columbia’s access to justice.
The JDD Lab is based at the Access to Justice Centre for Excellence (ACE) at the University of Victoria. Lab Director Kate Gower and a team of graduate students from Law and Data Science use machine learning and AI to collect and analyze new data – today’s data is from the social media site, Reddit1.
This updates gives you the JDD Lab’s analysis of Reddit data to May 2024.
1. We hit our first year milestone!
The Lab has been fully operational and running teams of interdisciplinary graduate students since May 2023! We have 4208 Reddit posts telling us what help British Columbian’s are asking for!
We continue to collect about 340 posts month for BC. We are also collecting data for Canada’s other provinces to share with researchers across the country.
Climb in and play with the interactive display of Data Update No 5 below. Remember to set the Relevance slider (at the top right of the Report) to “0.6”2 for the best chance of identifying what the clusters are about.
JDD Lab – Interactive Cluster Report – Data Update No 5 – May 2024:
What we see: The Cluster Reports for April and now May 2024 show tightening clusters around Employment problems and Tenancy problems.
What we are doing: We are digging deeper in to these two biggest clusters to see if we can identify where people in BC are getting stuck as they work to resolve their everyday legal problems.
2. Get ready for new analysis from the JDD Lab!
In our second year, the JDD Lab has a new interdisciplinary team of interns at the with four new projects. For example, watch this space for new displays of the Reddit data as a “time series”. We hope to show problem clusters “bubbling up” in the data over time, something medical researchers have shown can be done. Watch this space!
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 on why, see Data Update No. 2, or 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. ↩︎