Reflection 3 — Supreme Court

This week has really made me realize how much I need to buckle down and get to work on my data collection and building the tools. I think right now I need to work on building a web scraper to get collect all the Supreme Court documents I need online, and put them into text files for each justice. I found a website in which the URL of each case mimics the docket number, so now I just need to write a code that will collect the documents. This should be fairly easy to do, but I will need help from computer science professors. However, that is what I will spend most of this week doing. Since I already have a lot of my research done and some of my literature review written (because my outline consisted of parts of my literature review), it shouldn’t be too hard to dedicate my time to building the code for this part of the project. After that, I just need to run the topic modeling analysis on MALLET—which I already did with the sample text MALLET came with. So, that should be fairly easy to put together. My goal for the end of the week is to have successfully collected by data and to begin the analysis.

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