Abstract (including statements of innovation and humanities significance)

The purpose of this proposal is to obtain an $80,000 grant to build a web based platform, which enables legal documents to be visually accessible to humanities researchers.  The project will incorporate data mining tools such as Voyant to enhance the critical analyses of researchers when reviewing legal documents.  The first step to achieving this goal involves the digitalization and data mining of the legal transcripts of Oscar Wilde’s trials (over six hundred pages), which will be used to test this system.  Assuming that the tests prove successful - where success is measured in the accessibility of the results - the system will be expanded into a web based tool for academics to understand legal documents through visualizations as well as provide an educational method for legal students to read documents such as legal opinions as descriptive narratives with a fictional component.

Prospectus