1. Interdisciplinary Legal Research: Data Mining as Preliminary Research (I)
Dana Neacsu

2. Hypothetical 1:
If, indeed, fake news had a crucial impact on our presidential elections, could we challenge the outcome of the 2016 presidential elections? On what ground?

3. ProQuest Statistical Insight
Search CLIO
Provides statistical data from U.S. government publications from 1973, state and private sources from 1980, and international organizations from 1983.
Tabular formats
Wide breadth of formats
Examples
Evolving Role of News on Twitter and Facebook (Pew Research)
Role of News on Facebook: Common Yet Incidental (Pew)
Beyond Facebook, Small Portions Of The Public Learn About The Elections On Social Media [January 18-27, 2016 Survey](Page no.012 Table no.002)
Internet Activities Of Adults By Geographic Community Type: 2010 To 2013 [Selected Months](Page no.750 Table no.1177) (Statistical Abstract)

4. Election Results ICPSR
United States General Election Exit Polls Series
American National Election Study: 2016 Pilot Study (ICPSR 36390)
The survey included questions about preferences in the presidential primary, stereotyping, the economy, discrimination, race and racial consciousness, police use of force, and numerous policy issues, such as immigration law, health insurance, and federal spending
During the past 4 years, have you ever sent a message on Facebook or Twitter about a political issue, or have you not done this in the past 4 years?
Dave Leip presidential Election Results – county by county
From DSSC, 2016 not available yet.

5. Polling data Roper Center for Public Opinion Research
iPoll
Specializes in public opinion surveys and has local, state, national and international pools
Data on American politics includes coverage relating to presidential approval, U.S. elections (including exit polls), and congress.
Access polls at question level
Examples:
1) Which one of the following is your main source of political news and information?...Television, Internet, newspaper, radio, social media like Facebook and Twitter, talking with others, do you not really follow politics...And, which is your next major source of political news and information? (NBC)
How much of what you post on Facebook is related to politics (including the 2016 elections)? (Rew)
General Social Survey (NORC)
Since 1972
A historical record of the concerns, experiences, attitudes, and practices of residents of the United States.
Data Explorer -
Variety of variables on internet use and opinions.

6. A word on Social Media Data
Searching archival collections will typically require funding and programming ability
Capturing data moving forward may be more feasible
Twitter archiving Google sheet:  
A list from NCSU Libraries:

7. Secondary sources – Google Searches Primary Sources – Data mining
Hypothetical 2: If you needed to find the homicide data during for US cities, how would you obtain it?
Secondary sources – Google Searches
Primary Sources – Data mining

8. Macro-management of interdisciplinary legal research: What data
Macro-management of interdisciplinary legal research: What data? From what databases? Free-of charge or proprietary?

9. Web Scraping
Extracting and parsing formatted data from a web page *(HTML, XHMTL, JSON etc.).
Automated or manual
Python
Beautiful Soup -
 Toolkit for dissecting a document and extracting what you need. It doesn't take much code to write an application
Manages encodings
Sits on top of popular Python parsers like lxml and html5lib
Gathering election results example:

10. Web Scraping Automated tools (no programing) Import.io
Cloud based web application
No longer free apparently, but free trial is available
Webscraper.io
Chrome browser plug in available free
 Sitemap building, data extraction and export are all done within browser
Have not used, but there is Youtube:

11. Web Scraping Premade tools (many applications on GitHub)
Example – NYPD Crash Data Band Aid
On Github -
NYPD released data based through “idiotically obfuscated PDFs”
Tool is built in python and on top of xpdf and wget

12. Training and Help Lynda.com (through libraries license)
Python: Programming Efficiently
Code Academy.
Python intro in addition to a variety of web based APIs
Digital centers in the libraries
Python open lab
R open lab
Collaborators at Columbia University
An appointment-based free consulting service for students and researchers at Columbia University that offers assistance with planning and executing data driven research projects, including help with data visualization, analysis and prediction, both in conceptual terms and with concrete software implementations.

13. The research for both hypotheticals is preliminary research necessary to build a case
Then you move on to see if that data might fit the legal grounds your legal research has yielded

14. Questions? Dana Neacsu: edn13@Columbia.edu
Many thanks to Eric Glass & Amy Nurnberger!