See Professor Hall's Instrctions if you are in her class.
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If you are a student in another class, please refer to the instructions below.
SCOTUS NOTES ACADEMIC SERVICE LEARNING PROJECT – 10 service hours
Title: SCOTUS NOTES ACADEMIC SERVICE-LEARNING PROJECT 10 service hours
Transcribe the handwritten conference notes left by Supreme Court justices. Your transcriptions will provide unprecedented access to the justices' conversations in thousands of Court decisions.
The transcription will contribute to key research about law and politics as each participant will become a citizen archivist and transcriber, creating materials that will be of use and openly available to scholars interested in law, policy, and decision making in the nation's highest court. Perhaps the most meaningful outcome is that the collaborative will provide public access to documents that will open up the Court in ways not possible to those who cannot access the Library of Congress or travel to law schools around the country. In so doing, they will also provide these insights in a format that will lead to a better understanding of the justices' decision making process on a wide variety of important cases over the past half century.
The purpose of the project is three-fold:
- Provide on-line access to a large collection of almost 50,000 pages of Supreme Court conference notes that reside at the Library of Congress, Washington and Lee Law School, and Yale Law School, by digitizing all the notes;
- Engage citizen archivists and transcribers to crowdsource transcriptions of the justices' notes with greater efficiency and accuracy than could be done by researchers at participating institutions; and
- Facilitate large-scale quantitative analysis based on these notes to demonstrate how justices interact with one another as they make decisions on law and policy in the United States.
- Virtual Learning or Tutorial
Unlock Who Said What and When! Our goal is to generate a searchable archive of everything written in hundreds of meetings where the Supreme Court decided thousands of cases. Identify A Line of Notes Use your cursor to underline a full line of text. Then you will be prompted to transcribe the text you have underlined
Transcribing Tips: Transcribe the handwritten words exactly as they appear. This includes abbreviations, shortened words, symbols, etc. Sometimes you will come across notations that are very difficult to decipher. In fact, some words (or letters) may not be legible. This is completely normal so do not fret! If there are letters you cannot transcribe, please replace each unclear letter with an asterisk (*). Read Background information, About section, and FAQ sections. https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/scotus-notes-behind-the-scenes-at-supreme-court-conferenc
- Virtual Service or Task
Click the “transcribe full record” button and follow tutorial and directions on the page. Underline a piece of text. A piece of text is defined as one line of text within the conference notation sections. To learn more about the document, click the information icon below the image
- Virtual Reflection - Submit to your professor
Submit a reflection to capture what you learned in this project.
What did you learn about SCOTUS through this experience?
What did you find most intriguing about transcribing SCOTUS NOTES?
Describe how you saw the importance of this work to the work of the Supreme Court?
As a result of this assignment, how can you use this experience to help others?
