By Jason Wilson
Over at Scholarly Kitchen today, Joe Esposito has a terrific post on “sensor publishing“, or how publishers might utilize the data created by our cell phones as we move about the planet.
Sensor publishing is the opposite of face-down publishing. Face-down publishing has at its center the interface between a human and a mobile phone, which is viewed face-down. The data displayed on that phone is likely to be sifted by a sophisticated series of back-end processes, but the defining characteristic of the paradigm is to deliver content to the mobile user. With sensor publishing, the people who carry mobile phones are essentially hosts, a necessary and convenient means to get sensors into the environment. For sensor publishing, the mobile phone is an input; for face-down publishing, the mobile phone is the platform for the output.
Sensors have been a hot topic for the last couple of years, and now that most advanced mobile phones have embedded GPS and accelerotomer sensors, the data that is capable of being produced by these devices is remarkable. But this post isn’t about sensors.
Esposito mentions “face-down” publishing to refer to the paradigm of how we “look down” at our mobile phones to interact with them. In an earlier post, he contrasts this with the paradigms of “lean forward” and “lean back,” both of which we understand to mean engaged in media consumption (e.g., searching, scanning) and casual media consumption (e.g., television, magazines). Legal research is decidedly lean forward. But it may not remain that way.
As I read the sensor piece, I was taken back to Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions and Jeff Jonas and Lisa Sokol’s chapter on “Data Finds Data.”
Next-generation “smart” information management systems will not rely on users dreaming up smart questions to ask computers; rather, they will automatically determine if new observations reveal something of sufficient interest to warrant some reaction, e.g., sending an automatic notification to a user or a system about an opportunity or risk.
In the context of legal research, we are the data, and by that, I mean the data you’ve created over the last, say, 2-3 years of just researching and filing cases.
If I were to analyze your research log files, I might see that you have a concentration on California state practice, involving general civil claims (excluding defamation and products liability cases), and perform more research from January through March than at any other time. My survey of your courthouse data confirms much of this, but also shows that you’re practice is principally defense oriented (but you dabble in prosecuting artist-rights cases), you have a “vigorous” motion practice, you tend to put in vacation letters during the latter part of July, and for similar cases, you tend to recycle some of your briefing. For any given research project, I can marry up the facts you’re looking for and the cases you’ve saved or printed with those you’ve put in your briefs and other filings (and thus identify your client ID with an actual client name, and possibly get a glimpse into your defense strategy), and I have a collection of statutes and secondary sources that you tend to rely on most in your practice.
Given all this data you’ve generated, it’s not a far-fetched notion that instead of leaning forward into legal research that the systems we use to find new cases, updates, information, etc. might actually become aware of your needs in real time and put it “in your face.” As new data enters the system, its relevance can be detected and published to the user. The more we search and publish within this system, our data’s needs become clearer and the system’s ability to extract meaning from it and make assertions about the new data becomes faster and more accurate. How that information is “pushed” is anybody’s guess. It could be in the form of a daily digital paper, with sections on case and statutory developments, courthouse happenings, and new books for your practice. It could even be more targeted than that, where you receive an alert about a new case that might affect a pending motion in your client’s case.
The point is this. The more we search and file now, the less we may be searching in the future. Obviously there are a number of obstacles to this vision, but if the present is any indication, they aren’t insurmountable.
[Image (CC) by WarzauWynn]
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