Being a hype word, AI has many definitions & expectations. The following description is refreshing in the midst of a hype! So what is artificial intelligence? The truth is, it’s not a science in the common sense of the word. Rather, it’s an aspirational concept that doesn’t quite fit today’s realities. Modern artificial intelligence is …
After teaching legal information retrieval to first year law students for a few weeks, I started thinking about how we actually search for legal sources. Barbara Bintliff’s thoughts were very interesting in this regard: Legal research no longer requires beginning with knowledge of the law because the emphasis of electronic research is on facts and …
Excellent post on The Plagiarism Perplex by Barbara Fister on plagiarism and the grey area between creativity and sharing, writing and reading: There is an extraordinary tension in our culture between individual creativity and the creative community, between originality and a shared body of knowledge, between the acts of reading culture and writing culture. And our students …
Plagiarism as tension between creativity and sharing Read More »
As apps increasingly find their way into everyday life, they also accompany students, lawyers and teachers in their everyday tasks. The idea of Law as an App can certainly help to create better learning and professional environments if applied in the right way. Pam Storr and I recently published a blog post on apps in …
It seems context is not only a buzzword within information retrieval: One of the hottest concepts in mobile right now is the idea of context. The thought process goes something like this: because the modern smartphone comes equipped with all kinds of sensors, is always on, and tends to be touched by its owner quite …
Though there are different theories on why people search for information – suggesting uncertainty, satisfying a goal or simple curiosity – a gap in knowledge seems rather convincing in a legal setting. Assuming that lawyers generally search for legal sources in order to deal with a working task, the following statement is very persuasive: Some …
Quote of the month: Legal information retrieval vs jigsaw puzzles Read More »
Information overload is apparently not a new phenomena but was already noticed by Morris L Cohen, co-author of How to Find the Law (pdf), in 1968: […] the materials of our law seem to be marked by an accelerating birth rate, an almost non-existent mortality rate, and a serious resistance to contraception on the part …
Two questions are of importance when discussing legal information retrieval: In my opinion, the triad of these building blocks – legal theory, technology and users – has to be taken into consideration when one asks how legal information retrieval can be improved. Carol Kuhlthau said in 1991: There appears to be a gap between the …
Where legal sources meet technology and their users Read More »
Continuing on the subject of context ….. […] the major different cognitive structures of individual users […] may be represented to intermediary mechanisms and IR systems, e.g. the actual work task or interest leading to a current cognitive state which may end up in a problem or uncertainty state for the actual user. These mental …
Reading a lot of material on the user perspective of information retrieval, I came across the following quote: […] despite experience with using general-purpose search engines, users may never discover strategies such as those known by the expert reference librarians. The knowledge to use such strategies needs to be explicitly taught. Furthermore, the decomposition and …
Quote of the month: users and procedural knowledge Read More »
