The Charter Disassembled

As I said I might, I did in fact “feed” IBM’s Many Eyes with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, just to see what a “tag cloud” for it would look like. You can get to it here, or by clicking on the image.

As you can see our anxieties — French, English, language — are writ large. (En anglais, il faut dire; je me demande comment la version français apparaîtrait et s’il y aurait des differences entre les versions…) I’m glad to see “law” is larger than “government.”

The site uses Java, so you’ll have to have that enabled. Mousing over a word gives you a sampling of the contexts in which it appears; searching for a term causes it to come into focus; and wild cards are possible in searches.

Because it was possible with free text data, I also created a word tree of the Charter. This seems to diagram sentence parts, in the sort of way the older ones among us might have done in highschool English class. At any rate, it shows you the branches that flow from — or to — words that you choose. Again, you can access it here or by clicking on the image.

This is not serious work, of course, but I do think that the application of various visualizations of data that are possible now to legal material would bear further study.