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Evaluation ViewAttendees 21

Research + Analysis

Teaching + Training

Can Computers Find Racist Laws? Virginia's Text Mining Project to Identify Jim Crow Legislation

Monday, July 17, 2023
10:45am – 11:45am EDT
Location: Hynes-207
This program explores "Modeling a Racial Caste System: Algorithmic Exposure of Virginia’s Jim Crow Laws" and "On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance," two projects in a multi-state partnership using topic modeling analysis on state session laws to identify Jim Crow legislation between 1865 and 1967. Each participating state will create open-access corpora of Jim Crow laws and of all state session laws from 1865-1967. As collaborators in this initiative, the speakers will discuss their efforts to prepare digital corpora of their state laws and apply machine-learning techniques, create an open-access and searchable portal to state laws, incorporate these tools into legal reference and pedagogy, and conduct outreach about the project and the history of racist law-making in Virginia and North Carolina.

Target Audience:

Legal information professionals interested in learning more about artificial intelligence (AI); anyone interested in the future of legal data and research; and anyone interested in the potential for reparative historical research and curricula related to the extensive state-specific systems of racist legislation.

Takeaways:

  • Participants will discover a set of open-source tools and workflows for digitizing and making accessible historical legal records.
  • Participants will be able to plan for the challenges of managing a collaborative empirical legal data project with an interdisciplinary team including teaching faculty.
  • Participants will be prepared to think critically about biases and algorithms as they engage in legal research.