Dive #8: National Open Court Data Standards (NODS), October 10, 2024
Court data are in higher demand than ever before. A growing number of users—both within and outside of courts—seek data that are accessible, accurate, and easy to understand. To support courts’ data-sharing and data-use efforts, NCSC has created the National Open Court Data Standards (NODS).
Watch this webinar to learn more about the standards and implementation efforts underway. We’ll hear from representatives of Arizona, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Puerto Rico about how they are using NODS in their jurisdictions.
Dive #7: Capturing the Potential of GIS to Explore Legal Deserts, September 2024
There are many potential barriers to accessing legal services. In this webinar, learn how GIS data can help identify barriers and opportunities for providing legal access and services to the public.
Three examples, including Legal Deserts maps for CCJ/COSCA, the Arizona Access to Justice effort, and dashboards created for the Commission on Indiana’s Legal Future, highlight how GIS data can be captured and turned into tools that provide insights and aid decision-making.
Dive #6: Court Statistics, August 2024
This webinar showcases NCSC’s long-standing Court Statistics Project, a joint project with the Conference of State Court Administrators that:
- Publishes the only comparable data on state court caseloads
- Provides information on how state courts are organized and administered
- Promotes data literacy and governance
- Convenes the Data Specialists' Roundtable for collaboration
Dive #5: Record Linkage, April 2024
Courts today deal with large amount of data records, often times spread across different databases. As the conversation about the best methods for managing and analyzing this data advances, our team at NCSC is also exploring ways to streamline this process. Record Linkage is one tool that can help. Record Linkage is a method for matching data records across multiple databases using common identifiers like names and addresses.
In this overview, you will learn:
- Different ways of doing data linkage
- Factors to consider
- Program suggestions to get started on matching records
Dive #4: 5 things to know about Data Governance, November 2023
With the rapidly expanding use of AI and advanced data analytics, the use of data in modern court systems continues to expand at a rapid pace. Data are essential for effective and efficient court operations, case management, strategic planning, policy development, and budgeting. But without a cohesive and well-defined approach to managing court data, inefficiencies, poor data quality, and unnecessary risk exposure will occur. A strong data governance policy helps to prevent inefficiencies and manage risk while ensuring accessibility to reliable data needed for decision making and meeting the courts core objectives.
Dive #3: Data Storytelling, October 2023
Data storytelling is an approach to presenting information that combines traditional text and visuals, often interactive, to simplify complex information and highlight key insights. The integration of analytics and thoughtfully crafted visuals into an engaging presentation makes this approach especially valuable at persuading targeted audiences and informing decision makers.
In this overview, you will learn:
- What is data storytelling?
- What are the key elements?
- How do you get started?
- What are the benefits?
- Are there any disadvantages?
- What tools or assistance are available?
Dive #2: Beyond ChatGPT: How can AI tools help you?, August 2023
This live workshop during the Data Specialists and Information Technologists Summit focused on NCSC's experience using large language models, such as ChatGPT, to extract data from court documents. Our team provided an overview of how ChatGPT works, its limitations and alternative ways to overcome limitations for its use. The workshop also featured a demonstration of a data pipeline which took in PDF documents, performed Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for extracting the text, and then restructured the textual information into a CSV file using ChatGPT.
Learn more by viewing the workshop materials:
Dive #1: Web Scraping 101, July 2023
Web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites using automated tools or programs to access web pages, read the page’s source code or other structured data on those pages, and extract the desired information.
In this overview, you will learn:
- The difference between web scraping and web crawling
- What skills and tools are used for web scraping
- Common use cases
- Risks for sites/organizations that have their sites scraped
- Ways to mitigate risks
- When web scraping is harmless
A decision tree infographic is also available.