Research Seminars

The OYEZ Project: How sport empowered the world's largest group spoken-word corpus

Professor Jerry Goldman

16:00 Tuesday 29th April 2008

Abstract

The hapless Chicago Cubs baseball team has not won a world championship in 100 years. It takes fortitude and a suspension of disbelief to support such a team. In 1989, at one such game, the idea for the Oyez Project took form. It rested on a metaphor familiar to American kids: the baseball card. Creating an electronic version of a card (using HyperCard) transformed analog ideas into digital reality.
This included real-time update on performance stats, a virtual "tour" of the "playing field," the law-baseball quiz, and access to past "games." This last feature -- access to and sharing of -- all the U.S. Supreme Court's audio materials is the current heart of the Oyez Project.

The Oyez Project today is an archive of all audio materials recorded in the courtroom for the last 53 years. It amounts to about 9000 hours of group interaction (with upwards of 12 participants per argument) recorded on reel-to-reel tapes for nearly the entire period. The audio quality varies considerably and imposes challenging engineering issues to render and share acceptable versions for public use. With excessive deliberateness, the Court finally switched to a digital recording system. Ironically, it now records to non-archival quality.

This talk will explain how the Oyez Project came into being and the current state of its holdings. It will also examine the engineering and administrative challenges to manage and deliver rich audio content to varied audiences worldwide. Today, the archive is about 55 million words aligned to audio at the sentence level. When complete, the archive will exceed 100 million words aligned to audio at the sentence level.

Biography

Professor Goldman heads the OYEZ Project, a multimedia relational database devoted to the United States Supreme Court http://www.oyez.org. With a major grant from the National Science Foundation, Goldman is working with collaborators in linguistics, psychology, computer science and political science to create a complete archive of 50 years of Supreme Court audio.

Goldman has been a several-time recipient of software awards from the American Political Science Association, including the 2005 APSA Best Instructional Website Award for IDEAlog, an application to analyze political values (created with Prof. Kenneth Janda) http://www.idealog.org. He is also a recipient of the 1997 EDUCOM Medal and the 1998 Silver Gavel Award of the American Bar Association for improving public understanding of law. In 2005, the Department awarded him the Farrell Teaching Prize for his long commitment to undergraduate teaching and advising.