ITR-SCOTUS: A Resource for Collaborative Research in Speech Technology, Linguistics, Decision Processes, and the Law

This project will create a digital audio archive that will enable

scientists in several fields to approach novel research issues in speech and language

studies, issues in group decision-making, and issues at the leading edge of

human communication scholarship. The Supreme Court of the United States

(SCOTUS) has been recording its public proceedings since 3 October 1955.

These recordings - now in the National Archives - span nearly five decades

and consist principally of oral arguments in which justices and attorneys

engage in various forms of persuasion and communication between bench and

bar and, obliquely, among the justices themselves. The arguments have been

transcribed professionally across the entire period, creating a matchless

collection of audio materials coupled with highly accurate transcripts. The

audio - along with other activities captured on audio such as the

announcement of opinions - offers a unique opportunity for researchers

across a wide spectrum of disciplines to engage in novel and transforming

research projects that were once thought beyond the reach of investigators.

The chief result of this work will be a complete and continuing archive of

more than six thousand hours of SCOTUS audio. It will provide synchronized

(i.e., time-coded) transcripts of the collection, identify and tag

individual speakers, build new mark-up tools for these new domains, and

share the corpus with researchers and faculty. The result of this

interaction among political scientists, legal scholars, linguists, and

computer scientists will yield: new knowledge in the modeling of

multi-party discussions with complex goals, novel strategies in small group decision

process analysis, and path-breaking approaches to extended collaborative

commentary addressing the dynamics of human communication.

The SCOTUS archive will be maintained as a shared public resource to

enhance study and understanding of the Supreme Court of the United States. It will

be available to anyone with World Wide Web access. Based on past

experience, principal audiences include: researchers across diverse domains, teachers

and students, lawyers and litigants, and the visually- and

hearing-impaired.

Today, more than a million unique users access selected SCOTUS materials

each month. With a complete and updated SCOTUS archive and improved ability

to query and search, the number of users should expand substantially.

By exploiting common interest and beneficial interactions among diverse

research communities, this project will create a vast collection of digital

objects. Working with partners experienced in data-sharing, the effort aims

at revolutionizing the ability to collaborate with physically distributed

teams of researchers and their students.