Here’s something I cobbled up for Crim Proc last semester: an attempt to chart the Revised Rules of Criminal Procedure (based on Prof. Te’s outline and class discussions). It was not a course requirement, but I wanted to visualize the process in its entirety. I enjoyed this particular project, and I’m willing to keep working on it based on feedback. I know of no other parallel effort working at the same level of detail. Come to think of it, advanced visualization, long a mainstay in science and engineering, is woefully absent in law, where masses of interrelated, sometimes overlapping statutes, decisions and rules need to be mapped out as a whole. Perhaps graphical representations are considered juvenile in a stodgy tradition built on words. I’ll have none of that. As a programmer, I’ve long relied on visualization to make sense of complex systems (check out this UNIX timeline, and this concept map of Java technologies). What I like about visualization is that It forces you to think about relationships and interactions that words may (accidentally or intentionally) hide.
The current version is rough and incomplete, plus the semantics of the modelling language are inconsistent. I had to do everything in a hurry, using only Word (which, not surprisingly, began to buckle and choke once the diagram started growing in complexity). I’m thinking of a formal visual language like UML, coupled with a real diagramming software like Visio, should address these issues. But first I need to get this one out, lazy web style, and hope that feedback will trickle in to guide me.
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