Jerry Goldman

Accessing the spoken word

Spoken-word audio collections cover many domains, including radio and television broadcasts, oral narratives, governmental proceedings, lectures, and telephone conversations. The collection, access, and preservation of such data is stimulated by political, economic, cultural, and educational needs. This paper outlines the major issues in the field, reviews the current state of technology, examines the rapidly changing policy issues relating to privacy and copyright, and presents issues relating to the collection and preservation of spoken audio content .

Emotions, Oral Arguments, and Supreme Court Decision Making

Students of linguistics and psychology demonstrate that word choices people make convey information about their emotions and thereby their intentions. Focusing on theory from these related fields we test whether the emotional content of Supreme Court justices’ questions and comments made during oral arguments allow us to predict the decisions they make. Using aggregate data from all arguments between 1979 and 2008 and individual-level data from 2004 through 2008 we find justices’ use of more unpleasant language towards the attorney representing one side of a case reduces the probability that side will prevail on the merits, both in terms of individual justices’ votes and the overall case outcome.

Access to large spoken archives: Uses and technology. Sponsored by SIG VIS

With recent advances in information technology, digital archiving is emerging as an important and practical method for capturing the human experience. Large amounts of spoken materials and audiovisual materials in which speech is an important component are becoming available. This panel will discuss the uses of these mateials for education, information retrieval and dissemination, and research, the requirements that arise from these uses, and speech recognition and retrieval technologies being developed to meet these requirements. These materials have tremendous potential for enriching the presentation of information in education, newscasts and documentaries, but retrieval from and access to these large repositories pose significant challenges. The panel will provide an overview of these issues.

Political Science: Multimedia for Research and Teaching--The Oyez Oyez Oyez and the History and Politics Out Loud Projects.

This essay describes the creation of Web-based multipurpose multimedia databases concerned with the Supreme Court and other historically and politically significant institutions, events, and actors. These databases enrich instruction and may encourage learning. These materials are rich in emotive content that text-only transcriptions never capture. Scholars have only begun to tap multimedia resources. Their scholarship becomes verifiable when such media are open to all. Web access is one step toward this objective. Serious multimedia content providers may discover that hybrid compact disk (CD) and digital video disk (DVD) technology can simultaneously protect their intellectual property and encourage its use.

Resolution of Appellate Litigation A Controlled Experiment

Appellate courts—both state and federal—have experienced dramatic increases in court business since 1960. A popular policy for meeting this demand has been to encourage litigants to end their disputes short of decision by the judges. This article reports the results of the first controlled experiment in the federal appellate court system to test the efficacy of two innovative court procedures designed to meet the litigation explosion swamping the federal courts of appeals: court-supervised confer ences with appellate advocates and court-issued orders to control the speed of the appellate process in individual cases. Both procedures are radical departures from traditional practice. The results from the experiment indicate that the procedures did not significantly reduce appeals, produced negligible improvement in case quality, and had mixed effects in expediting the appellate process. The evidence from the experiment weakens the theory that gave birth to the policy. Nevertheless, further controlled experimentation under different conditions is essential in order to deter mine whether and to what extent the policy can be effective.