{"id":211,"date":"2013-12-24T07:33:30","date_gmt":"2013-12-24T12:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/?p=211"},"modified":"2013-12-24T07:33:30","modified_gmt":"2013-12-24T12:33:30","slug":"the-law-of-where-im-standing-right-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/2013\/12\/24\/the-law-of-where-im-standing-right-now\/","title":{"rendered":"The law of where I’m standing, right now."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"google-glass-what-its-like-8\"<\/a> [ Author note: I\u2019d like to start by saying thanks to all of our pals at Justia, and especially Tim Stanley<\/a> and Nick Moline<\/a>, for their help with all that is described in the following, and to the denizens of law-lib and contest winners Scott Vanderlin<\/a> and David Curle<\/a> in particular for help with testing images.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Some weeks back, our friends at Justia.com<\/a> very generously arranged for us to have access to Google Glass<\/a>. \u00a0We weren\u2019t at all sure how Glass fits into the legal-information world. \u00a0We still aren\u2019t, and that\u2019s what motivates this post. \u00a0But Glass is very, very cool, and it or something very like it will be transformative.<\/p>\n

Because it was very, very cool, we wanted to develop an app for it. \u00a0Like all garage-bound experimenters, we looked to see what we had laying around that might be made to work with it. \u00a0It turned out that Wayne Weibel<\/a> had done something very smart a while back (and that is not meant to imply that there is anything remarkable about Wayne doing smart things; he does that all the time). \u00a0We have a tool called Citationer that extracts citations from documents, and it has a Tesseract<\/a>-based OCR component that we use with image-based PDFs. \u00a0Turns out that it\u2019ll work with any image format, and Wayne had built that capacity out a bit, in the expectation that people would want to use it with document images sent from phones. \u00a0And, as it turns out, from Glass.<\/p>\n

So Wayne and Sara<\/a> and I took two days out of the office to see if we could whack something together that would let you take a picture with Glass and send it off to a server-based application that would send you back a link or links to anything cited in the image. \u00a0The result, almost entirely Wayne\u2019s work, \u00a0was an app called \u201cSigntater\u201d. \u00a0It works well with documents and some signage, and it raises a lot of questions.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s talk about its limitations, first. \u00a0I had a rush of brains to the head and realized that we needed things other than documents to test with. \u00a0There is a lot of signage out there with US Code and CFR citations on it. \u00a0I\u2019ve collected a few pictures of such things myself, and a quick look at Google Images and Flickr suggested that others might have done likewise. \u00a0We ran a little contest in which we enlisted law librarians to help us collect some of these images in Pinterest. [ parenthetical note: \u00a0if I had this to do over again, I wouldn\u2019t use Pinterest, because the apparatus for random participation by multiple individuals is terrible. \u00a0I\u2019d either ask people to tweet them with a particular hashtag, or collect them in Flickr.] \u00a0\u00a0A lot of people helped out, and we collected a lot of very good images of signs with citations<\/a>, some of which appear in this post.<\/p>\n

What we didn\u2019t know was that we\u2019d stumbled into a very hard problem in computer vision (\u201chard\u201d in the \u201cover one hundred research papers written last year on tiny aspects of the problem\u201d sense of \u201chard\u201d). \u00a0Extracting text from natural scenes<\/a>, as it\u2019s known, is something that many people would like to be able to do. \u00a0But it presents a lot of challenges, and is not very far advanced. \u00a0We were able to do some improvement of Signtater\u2019s performance by doing some simple image preprocessing using ImageMagick<\/a>, and I\u2019d like to do more when time permits. \u00a0But for right now Signtater\u2019s capabilities are limited to documents and signage that can be made to look like documents in the image — that is, mostly dark lettering on white backgrounds in an area that mostly fills the screen. \u00a0We were disappointed by the lack of range\u2026 but Signtater is still really, really cool.<\/p>\n

But then we started thinking<\/h2>\n

\"no-title-cfr\"<\/a><\/h2>\n

Some of the \u00a0images were problematic for other reasons. \u00a0Lots had incomplete context, like the one here that is missing its CFR Title number. \u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s an example of what Robin Wendler<\/a> has called the \u201con a horse\u201d problem. \u00a0\u00a0Robin once worked on metadata for a collection of images of Ulysses S. Grant. \u00a0The original cataloger had written descriptions every one of which assumed that you knew that the context was a collection of photos of Ulysses S. Grant. \u00a0So you\u2019d find descriptions like \u201cOn a horse\u201d, implying \u201cUlysses S. Grant on a horse\u201d. \u00a0Such context-dependent descriptions, and identifiers are the bane of Linked Data people. \u00a0And before you start making fun of the hapless Park Service employee who spends his whole life in Title 36 and assumes that everyone else does too, stop and think about Congressional bill numbers, which are no different, or the nest of snakes called SuDoc numbers<\/a>, which changes with changes in government structure.<\/p>\n

At a much more fundamental level, what do any of these signs even mean? \u00a0Until we came along with Signtater (which, by the way, is really, really cool), there was almost zero possibility than anyone would actually dereference any of these public-notice citations to find out what the law actually said. Well, OK, I guess I should be more generous — you don\u2019t need anything as really, really cool as Signtater, you could do the same thing from a phone. \u00a0But before 5 or 6 years ago there was almost no chance that anyone would ever look to see what the law actually said. \u00a0I\u2019m intrigued by the idea of a backpacker in a national park lugging around the CFR so she could check on such things, but I\u2019d say there\u2019s little chance that ever happened.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s really being said when somebody puts a citation on a sign in a public park? \u00a0One of two things, really:<\/p>\n

a) We claim to have the authority to do this, and here it is, so sit down and shut up, or<\/p>\n

b) We live so much in our own world that we don\u2019t even realize that most people don\u2019t live there with us.<\/p>\n

In the first, uncharitable explanation, the citation is just something official-looking that is put there to tell you that officials are official and are telling you something that you are officially required to obey. \u00a0It says what, but not in any language that anyone other than the author and a few others operating in the same narrow context are likely to understand. \u00a0As it happens, 36 CFR 261.50 (a) and (b) are, more or less, simple assignments of authority that don\u2019t specify particular behaviors. \u00a0You could argue, and I would agree, that some things like \u201c501(c)(3)\u201d \u00a0and \u201cS corporation\u201d are sufficiently part of the culture that they can, in fact, be dereferenced by most of the affected populations, but that ain\u2019t the case most of the time. \u00a0That raises the question of how much authority we should grant to any reference that can\u2019t be followed and read by those who are supposed to obey it.<\/p>\n

In the second, more charitable interpretation, the author is simply someone who lives and breathes Title 36, has done so for much of his working life, and has committed the somewhat more pardonable sin of assuming that everybody else does too. \u00a0Of\u00a0course<\/em> it’s Title 36 — we’re in a park, silly.<\/p>\n

You might find such behaviors bad in varying degrees depending on what you think about the motivations of those involved. A cynic would see the goal of a) as intimidation, where another might see b) as having its roots in something akin to the behavior of \u00a0absent-minded professors. \u00a0Fact is, technical specialists of many kinds are vulnerable to the interpretation of b)-based behaviors as a)-based misbehaviors. \u00a0That\u2019s why I\u2019ve always found lawyers and law professors who complain about the poor explanatory skills of computer technicians to be so ridiculous. \u00a0Talk about holding a mirror up to nature. \u00a0But I digress.<\/p>\n

Wait, where are we?<\/h2>\n

There\u2019s a still more intriguing question here. \u00a0The signs are an attempt to associate some part of the law with a particular place. \u00a0Glass has geolocation capability, and could do all that through an application that understood something I guess you\u2019d call \u00a0the law of where I\u2019m standing right now. \u00a0\u00a0But what is that, really? We\u2019d need to know a lot more in order to find out, even though theoretically a lot of the data is retrievable. \u00a0Apart from simple (or sometimes complex) questions of jurisdiction, places are regulated in many ways for many purposes. \u00a0A person standing in a Weis supermarket somewhere near Altoona, PA might want:<\/p>\n