IBM’s Visual Bill Explorer

I’ve talked on Slaw before about IBM’s Many Eyes, the project from their research lab that lets you upload data and turn it into visualizations of various kinds. Now they’ve developed a version called Many Bills, a way of searching through the bills presented to the U.S. Congress (during 2009) to find and present topics buried within these lengthy documents.

A search for [copyright] for example yields 61 bills and 106 sections within them that touch on copyright. Each bill is presented as a narrow stripe (50 to a very wide page, in this case), with the sections shown as coloured swatches, the colour identifying the area within which copyright is treated (e.g. science, commerce, international, social welfare, etc.). These areas are facets, controlled by a menu, so you can isolate all those sections dealing with copyright within one or a number of specific areas. Clicking on a swatch, which contains the first few words of a section, will bring up the full text of the section.

As you might imagine, there’s more to this than I’ve explained or, indeed, am easily able to explain in a blog post — that’s the way it is with visualizations. The best thing to do, if you’re interested, is pay Many Bills a visit. There’s a brief slide show tour and a help section to get you going. When you’ve got a sense of what you’re looking at, you might visit a saved search in which one “Christopher C” explored what U.S. bills in 2009 had to say about [Canada + the environment].

Although Canada does from time to time deal in daunting omnibus bills — see, for example, Bill C-44, from the last session of Parliament, ostensibly An Act to amend the Canada Post Corporation Act, but in fact an 880 page monster — our need for legislation software is somewhat different, I’d say. I’ve been trying without much success to discover the best way with the tools at hand to parse and lay out complex legislation, something that Many Bills shows us should be possible, whether or not IBM’s particular manner of presentation is ideal. If anyone has suggestions, I’d appreciate hearing them. (Robert Richards, now a columnist on Slaw, has helpfully listed some possibilities on his Legal Informatics Blog that I’m in the process of examining.)