Challenges and Opportunities for Visual Analytics in Jurisprudence

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fürst, Daniel, El-Assady, Mennatallah, Keim, Daniel A., Fischer, Maximilian T.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Fürst, Daniel
El-Assady, Mennatallah
Keim, Daniel A.
Fischer, Maximilian T.
author_facet Fürst, Daniel
El-Assady, Mennatallah
Keim, Daniel A.
Fischer, Maximilian T.
contents Legal exploration, analysis, and interpretation remain complex and demanding tasks, even for experienced legal scholars, due to the domain-specific language, tacit legal concepts, and intentional ambiguities embedded in legal texts. In related, text-based domains, Visual Analytics (VA) has become an indispensable tool for navigating documents, representing knowledge, and supporting analytical reasoning. However, legal scholarship presents distinct challenges: it requires managing formal legal structure, drawing on tacit domain knowledge, and documenting intricate and accurate reasoning processes - needs that current VA system designs for law fail to address adequately. We identify and describe key challenges and underexplored opportunities in applying VA to law, exploring how these technologies might better serve the legal domain. Interviews with nine legal experts reveal that current legal information retrieval interfaces do not adequately support the navigational complexity of law, often forcing users to rely on internalized legal expertise instead. To address this gap, we identify a three-phase workflow for legal experts, which highlights opportunities for VA to support legal reasoning through knowledge externalization and provenance tracking, leveraging tree-, graph-, and hierarchy-based visualizations. Through this contribution, our work establishes a user-centered VA workflow for the legal domain, recognizing tacit legal knowledge as a critical element of sense-making and insight generation, and situates these contributions within a broader research agenda for VA in law and other text-based disciplines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_06543
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Challenges and Opportunities for Visual Analytics in Jurisprudence
Fürst, Daniel
El-Assady, Mennatallah
Keim, Daniel A.
Fischer, Maximilian T.
Human-Computer Interaction
H.5.2
Legal exploration, analysis, and interpretation remain complex and demanding tasks, even for experienced legal scholars, due to the domain-specific language, tacit legal concepts, and intentional ambiguities embedded in legal texts. In related, text-based domains, Visual Analytics (VA) has become an indispensable tool for navigating documents, representing knowledge, and supporting analytical reasoning. However, legal scholarship presents distinct challenges: it requires managing formal legal structure, drawing on tacit domain knowledge, and documenting intricate and accurate reasoning processes - needs that current VA system designs for law fail to address adequately. We identify and describe key challenges and underexplored opportunities in applying VA to law, exploring how these technologies might better serve the legal domain. Interviews with nine legal experts reveal that current legal information retrieval interfaces do not adequately support the navigational complexity of law, often forcing users to rely on internalized legal expertise instead. To address this gap, we identify a three-phase workflow for legal experts, which highlights opportunities for VA to support legal reasoning through knowledge externalization and provenance tracking, leveraging tree-, graph-, and hierarchy-based visualizations. Through this contribution, our work establishes a user-centered VA workflow for the legal domain, recognizing tacit legal knowledge as a critical element of sense-making and insight generation, and situates these contributions within a broader research agenda for VA in law and other text-based disciplines.
title Challenges and Opportunities for Visual Analytics in Jurisprudence
topic Human-Computer Interaction
H.5.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06543