A question about legal citation mapping and analysis

[Loet Leydesdorff]

Dear David,

Perhaps, the program Pajek offers a solution for your visualization
problem. It is freely available (for academic usage) from the
mathematics department of the University of Ljubljana at
http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/pajek/ . For the statistics it
interfaces with Ucinet (a program for social network analysis) that is
nowadays commercial, but thirty days on trial.

With kind regards,


Loet
  _____

Loet Leydesdorff
Science & Technology Dynamics, University of Amsterdam
loet at leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics
> [mailto:SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU] On Behalf Of David G. Post
> Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2003 12:03 AM
> To: SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
> Subject: [SIGMETRICS] A question about legal citation mapping
> and analysis
>
>
> To all:
>     There's an enormously rich mine of citation information
> in various legal databases (Lexis, Westlaw), consisting of
> the citations from one case to another that form the 'web'
> (seamless or otherwise) of legal precedent.  Surprisingly,
> perhaps, there has been virtually no analytic work on the
> structure of that citation data -- notwithstanding the fact
> that it is, in some respects, the best picture we have of
> what the "law" actually consists of.
>     I'm planning a fairly substantial attack on some of the
> questions about what this citation network looks like, how it
> changes over time, and the like.  My question is this:  Can
> anyone on this list recommend a good source of
> mapping/clustering tools for producing 2-dimensional
> visualizations of citation data?  Assuming that I can get my
> hands of the relevant primary data (the matrix of legal
> decisions and all of the citations within those decisions to
> prior decisions), one of the things that I would like to do
> is to prepare visual depictions of the cases within various
> legal subdomains -- the network, say, of all cases dealing
> with the First Amendment, or copyright law, or bankruptcy law ...
>    I apologize if this query is too simple-minded to answer
> easily; I know that there is an enormous amount of
> information out there on information visualization, and I'm
> just hoping that some of the members of this list might be
> able to point me in productive directions.  Feel free to
> reply to me off-list, if you'd like.  Thanks in advance. David Post
>
>   * * *
> David G. Post     Professor, Temple Law School
> David.Post at temple.edu             202-364-5010
> <<http://www.temple.edu/lawschool/dpost/writings.html>>
> <<http://www.icannwatch.org>>
> SSRN:  <<http://ssrn.com/author=537>>
>
> "There are two possibilities: Either we are alone in the
> universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."-Arthur C. Clarke
>   * * *
>