Weeknote 10, 2023

§1: Graphical history view of your searches on Westlaw

If there is a theme to this week’s collection of interesting links, it would have to be the visualization of search and its results.

The image below is from a product update from Westlaw Canada:

§2: Talk to Wikipedia using chatGPT

From bespacific, I learned of this personal project called wikipediagpt.

https://wikipediagpt.streamlit.app/

It’s not so clever to understand that the user might have made a typo (or two):

§3: Build datasets with Constellate

Constellate is both a tool and a platform for text analysis, built for teaching and learning.

Constellate is the text analytics service from the not-for-profit ITHAKA – the same people who brought you JSTOR and Portico. It is a platform for teaching, learning, and performing text analysis using the world’s leading archival repositories of scholarly and primary source content.

Constellate enables schools of all sizes to teach data and text analytics with a learning platform that empowers faculty, librarians, and other instructors to educate a new generation of learners in text and data analysis. Our solution, centered on student and researcher success, provides text and data analysis capabilities and access to content from some of the world’s most respected databases in an open environment with a variety of teaching materials that can be used, modified, and shared. We envision a future where text and data analytics skills are being taught on Constellate in classes in all disciplines.

Without having to register on the site, readers can build their own set of JSTOR documents, using disciplinary filters and keywords:

From this dataset, you can generate a simple Term Frequency graph:

And if you click on Learn More, you are taken to a tutorial that illustrates the code behind the graph and are given an opportunity – if your institution subscribes to Constelllate – to open a copy of the code notebook in the Constellate Lab platform.

§4: What is Wikidata and Why You Should Do Data Entry For the Greater Good

The list of confirmed speakers of the upcoming 2023 CALL/ACBD Conference has been just posted and I’m on the list:

MITA WILLIAMS
Session Title: What is Wikidata and Why You Should Do Data Entry For the Greater Good

Conference Theme: Innovation and Research

“Wikidata began in 2012 as a project that extracted data points from Wikipedia Infoboxes. It has since grown into a separate database of millions of items on subjects across a vast range of knowledge domains including law. Wikibase, the software underlying Wikidata, provides a platform that makes these facts available as open, structured data and accessible through the SPARQL query language. Wikidata’s SPARQL_query_service allows for very different possibilities compared to traditional keyword searching. With SPARQL you can ask for a list of cities with a population over 100,000 led by a female mayor, a list of the most famous children of librarians, or a list of musicians who have died at the age of 27. This presentation will be an introduction to Wikidata and will suggest some of what might be possible if the law library community decide to contribute structured legal data for all to use and build upon.”

MITA WILLIAMS
Titre de la session : Qu’est-ce que Wikidata et pourquoi vous devriez y saisir des données pour le plus grand bien

Thème de la conférence : Innovation et recherche

“Wikidata a débuté en 2012 en tant que projet visant l’extraction des points de données des boîtes d’information de Wikipédia. Il s’est depuis transformé en une base de données distincte de millions d’articles portant sur des sujets dans divers domaines de connaissances, y compris le droit. Wikibase, le logiciel sous-jacent à Wikidata, fournit une plate-forme qui rend ces faits disponibles sous forme de données ouvertes, structurées et accessibles via le langage de requête SPARQL. Le service SPARQL_query_service de Wikidata offre diverses possibilités par rapport à la recherche par mot-clé traditionnelle. Avec SPARQL, vous pouvez demander une liste de villes de plus de 100 000 habitants dirigées par une mairesse, une liste des enfants les plus célèbres de bibliothécaires ou une liste de musicien.ne.s décédé.e.s à l’âge de 27 ans. Cette présentation sera un introduction à Wikidata et fera également une proposition concernant le potentiel des données juridiques structurées, si jamais la communauté des bibliothèques de droit décidait de fournir de telles données pour le bénéfice de toute personne qui pourrait les utiliser et exploiter.”