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A rough account of ‘The Gavel’ – project initiated by Donovan Hide, John O’Shea, Adrian McEwen and Andy Freeney at ScraperWiki Hacks and Hackers Hackday Liverpool, Friday 16th July 2010.

Early on in the Hack Day (described in previous post) potentially interesting data-sets were identified.  I had recently found various sources of information relating to legal processes, which are being made available via HMCS (Her Majesty’s Court Service) which I felt might lead somewhere.  Donovan Hide, a programmer (whose current projects include Churnalism*) also felt that this data was of potential interest and public value and together we decided to make something which would attempt to make legal process data more tangible.

Our first task was to identify appropriate sources and we found a couple of interesting things.  One early contender was Criminal Online Results, a government site in a BETA stage (so not using REAL data) but basically which will be publishing the names of persons accused and the length and dates of their jail sentence!

However, a second HMCS site we found seemed more appropriate to our project: Xhibit Court Services displays a kind of commentary on various Crown Court legal protocols and seems to be continually updated.  Donovan decided that he would like to develop some kind of REAL-TIME application which could notify the status of every court in nice clean data.  ScraperWiki would not be the right tool for this kind of continous live data and so Donovan opted for node.js which is a really fast way of writing a web server which could churn out an aggregation of court data in real-time.

Adrian McEwen (whose Bubblino** device has been a fixture of tech conferences across the country for the last year) also joined us and he had various bits of electronic hardware with him.  Together with Andy Freeney, part of the technical team at Liverpool JMU and self-described ‘tinkerer’, we all began to discuss what kind of physical output might be appropriate.

‘The Gavel’ (judge’s hammer) just seemed synonymous with the finality of legal rulings (even though they are rarely used today!) so we decided to find a way to bring a whole multitude of data and output to this one simple action – a judge, banging the gavel on his bench.

Strands of data scraped from the HMCS site are interpreted in different ways by the arduino micro-controller causing the gavel to strike the bench.

Example applications:

• tune-in and follow individual through court process
• notification of all legal proceedings in a specific geographic location
• hammer comes down every time a case is closed
• hammer comes down every time someone is given life!

Our presentation from the day is shared here and there are links to various other elements (including the scraper) below:

our scraper:

• http://github.com/donovanhide/The-Gavel

a project Donovan has begun developing in the days after the event:

• Cause List
• Track what’s going on in the courts of England & Wales right now
• http://causelist.org/

Adrian McEwen has done a write-up on his blog to here:

• http://www.mcqn.com/weblog/hacks_meet_hackers_liverpool

flickr photos from the day:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/john0shea/sets/72157624554065844/

*’Churnalism‘ uses various analytical methods examine news articles and determine what proportion has been directly lifted from press releases.

**’Bubblino‘ is a networked object which can be tuned into twitter #hashtags – when a specific hashtag is used, Bubblino blows bubbles!  Although simple in premise, I have grown fond of Bubblino’s rendering of dispersed data into a kind of processed physical FLOW.

ScraperWiki is a collaborative environment for building, running, storing and sharing web screen-scrapers and their resulting bounties of data.  (Here is a handy introduction to ScraperWiki by Paul Bradshaw.)  I was lucky enough to encounter ScraperWiki right at the very beginning when Julian Todd and Aiden McGuire launched the concept at Liverpool’s first Barcamp (at the end of 2008) and last Friday I had the opportunity to take part in the ScraperWiki ‘Hacks and Hackers Hackday‘ at open labs LJMU.

The object of the day was for ‘hacks’ (journalists + activist bloggers and curious citizens) to work with ‘hackers’ (programmers + geeks and persistent meddlers) to collaborate in attempting to dig out publicly available data from over the internet and use this to tell new stories.  Although, ScraperWiki was the proposed tool for doing this, the emphasis throughout was on accessing, understanding, re-interpreting and sharing previously oblique data.

The day began with presentations explaining the power of good data-visualisation and information graphics.  Examples cited were:

• BBC ‘best graph of the election’ – showing convergence of 3 Political Party’s public spending and taxation plans – suggesting very high chance of coalition govt.
• Nick Clegg on They Work for You (data from Public Whip) – showing data-vis need not be graphical (computer generated sentences.)
• Schooloscope (visualising schools in relation to OFSTED reports)
• GapMinder – Hans Rosling (below) – 2d comparisons over time – less divided world than we might think!

The delegation in attendance comprised of roughly three groups:

• professional journo’s (Liverpool Echo thru to Graniud) on ‘professional development’
• hardcore coders (already invested in ScraperWiki)
• & a sizeable contingent of those invaluable (and uncategorisable) people who are becoming harder to ignore these days now they are identified as the long tail.

What impressed me most about the event was the total commitment of all of those present to be involved in the process and deliver a fresh idea.

The value of such analytical approaches to journalism is immense and might well mark a sea-change away from soundbite political media. However, my own interest in screen-scraping is perhaps more inclined towards provocative and experimental data-usage and applications which demand reflection on the unanticipated dormant potentials within our familiar networked technology and databases.

Some more blog posts about the day here:

• Policemen, Judges and Libraries – ScraperWikiBlog
• Liverpool’s ScraperWiki Hacks and Hackers Hack Day – Alison Gow
• Hacks meet Hackers – Mike Nolan
• Using Data to Track Bobbies on the Beat – Ed Walker
• Hacks meet Hackers – LJMU News Update

Of course – another strategy for making information/data and concepts more ‘tangible’ or ‘graspable’ when exhibiting in the public realm, is to re-present the information using a ‘loaded’ material, (as this example from a Liverpool Museum demonstrates…)

How to visualise data/information, in a tangible way, in the public realm?

Back in November I had a look at this work, DEATH COUNTER by Santiago Sierra, which was installed on the front of Hiscox Insurance HQ in central London, for the course of 2009.

The giant LED, reminiscent of the digital clocks and information boards seen throughout most major cities, tallies (in real-time) the total number of human deaths worldwide, starting from zero at 00:00:00 on the 1st of January 2009.

In terms of ‘visualising data,’ there is a simple reciprocal relationship between a binary conception of life OR death and the counter-intuitive representation of these concepts as ‘one’ (death) and ‘zero’ (life), accumulating on the huge display.  Despite the potentially emotive subject matter, and the high value placed on individual human lives, the presentation is unspectacular in the extreme:

business as usual…

One quite remarkable aspect of the Sierra work, is the way in which it was funded – through a legal contract. The work was loaned to Hiscox for the duration of the exhibition, in exchange for a €150,000 life insurance policy, which would be payable in the event of the artists death.

Through a contextual balancing of an art-market value and an insurance value of the artists life, the work highlights and makes explicit the core component of the insurance industry – careful translation of the perceived, constant, risk of catastrophe into bankable capital.*

* As well as providing insurance for major banks such as Lloyds of London, Bermuda based Hiscox, provide cover in the event of kidnapping, hurricane and financial disasters. They posted pre-tax profits of £320.6m for 2009.

London Evening Standard (9/11/2009) / Insurance Daily