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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/

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

For those who didn’t see it, my lecture/performance ‘PENUMBRA’ from last month is archived here:

PENUMBRA from John 0Shea on Vimeo.

Performance, sketch and demonstration of concept – interpreting and re-presenting law using the construct of traditional theatrical lighting.

Originally performed as part of ‘REVOLUTIONS IN FORM’ @ The Bluecoat Art Centre, Liverpool on Friday 18th June 2010.

lovingly documented by: Sam Meech

Thanks to Nathan Jones, Bluecoat poet in residence, for the invitation.

My recent performance work – PENUMBRA – involves the use of traditional theatrical lighting to project a special ‘zone’ onto the stage – the lighted area is described as a “NO ZONE.”  Outside of the “NO ZONE” something is permitted.  And inside the “NO ZONE” that same something is prohibited.

The work attempts to mix-up roles which are usually kept separate – that of ‘on-stage’ actor/performer and ‘behind-the-scenes’ director/technician.

Designed as part of my response to Newcastle City Council’s ‘Interpretive Signage’ brief, which aimed at taking heritage information into the digital realm, the ‘Information Free Zone’ raises the questions “How much information do we need?” & “Where exactly can we go to get away from it?”

An ‘Information Free Zone’ would restrict “the use of the electromagnetic spectrum for wireless telegraphy (to include WIFI, SMS, Bluetooth etc)” and I proposed that the zone be applied to an already peaceful space next to the City’s Cathedral – Amen Corner – and went ahead and notified the public of this ominous change:

If the ‘Information Free Zone’ were to be applied in the UK public sphere, an important question would need to be addressed:

• Does the zone impose an ‘information embargo’ through the use of electromagnetic signal jamming technology?
• Or is the zone subscribed to by citizens (in a similar way to the quiet coach on a train.)

(A technologically imposed ‘Infromation Free Zone’ would likely be in contravention of the 2006 Wireless Telegraphy Act.)

Early responses from the public were mixed – here are some examples:

• I was shocked to see it!
• It is needed in buses and in parks
• It would be a pain
• I can’t see how it’s possible
• Is it not a breach of human rights?
• Everywhere should have one!
• We’ll need a few…
• I go fishing to switch off!

Typically, when re-presenting and interpreting ‘law’ we use ‘words’.  And such has been the bias of the use of the technology of words in re-presenting and interpreting ‘law’ that the two seperate things often become inter-mingled in our minds.  Example:

We talk about the letter of the law. But, in situations, where this phrase is deemed appropriate close scrutiny reveals that what we really mean is the law of the letter.

I’d like to imagine a universe where instead of ‘words’, ‘law’ is re-presented and interpreted using ‘light’ and ’shadow’.

In the opening chapter of ‘The Concept of Law’ (1961) “persistent questions” and “perplexities” at the heart of legal theory are outlined, and H. L. A. Hart (regarding the difficulty which judges and legislators face in interpreting and ascribing ‘law’) enigmatically states:

all rules have a penumbra of uncertainty

Hart’s allusion to the medium of ‘light’, and the boundary between light and shadow, to describe the edge/perimeter/boundary of ‘law’ not only makes for an elegant metaphor, but also points to a greater bandwidth of media – not merely words – which could be instrumentalised for legal communication.

Text extract from “PENUMBRA” – performance/demonstration of concept at Liverpool’s Bluecoat Art Centre on Friday 18th June 2010.  More information relating to the event: ‘REVOLUTIONS IN FORM’

Early in the year I took this photograph of the door handle at one of Newcastle’s Court Houses and it started me thinking about the following question:

If ‘law’ had a handle, what would it look like?

I began a wiki page to try and open this question up, in relation to my Final Project at Culture Lab:

• http://www.fromconcentrate.net/WIKI/doku.php?id=if_law_had_a_handle

Here is the final layout of my piece comparing clock mechanisms and legal process as it appeared in  Mercy’s “12 Angry Men” E-Zine.  The piece features a cryptic kafka-esque illustration by Franky Hale-Lynch.  (In most browsers, clicking on the image below will enlarge it.)

I wrote a new piece ov fiction drawing a comparison between the evolution of clock mechanisms and the workings of the Law.  It has been published and beautifully illustrated in an excellent new e-Zine from my long-time collaborators – Mercy – read it here:  I am a Watchmaker

Writing a fictional narrative was a completely new departure for me and was actually really helpful for working thru aspects of my current understanding. To quote the Watchmaker:

‘Seeking Law in the relentless stutter of parliamentary acts and decrees is like searching for Time in the mechanism of a clock.’

Deadbeat Escapement gif used under CC Licence – Wikimedia Commons