Visualizing Constitution of India – 1

[Thejesh GN]

First one is word cloud

http://thejeshgn.com/2011/08/31/visualizing-constitution-of-india-1/

Thej
--
Thejesh GN
http://thejeshgn.com

[Karthik Bettadapura]

Hi,

Interesting one.

On similar lines, we tried understanding tweets related to the IAC. Here are the links to some visualizations we came up with:

http://www.dataweave.in/lokpal_bill_twitter.html
http://www.dataweave.in/lokpal_bill_twitter_static.html

- Karthik

[Maya Indira Ganesh]

Thanks for this Karthik.
Thej - I'd think that the Constitution is a document that lays out how-tos, duties and responsibilities of the State and process right ? So it would mention those sorts of elements more right, rather than "people"? But then again, I haven't actually read the Constitution so not sure - just a hunch.

[Thejesh GN]

Hi All,

BTW I am working on constitutional amendments over the years. Do you know any place where I can get raw constitutional change data.

PDFs are okay, I will convert to text. I will probably load it into a mercurial and get diff.

Thanks,

Thej
--
Thejesh GN
http://thejeshgn.com

[S Anand]

This is cool!

Do you want to try something along the lines of http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterSpectrum/TwitterSpectrum.html to compare our constitution with others? Or versions of the constitution? 

Actually, while we're at it, why not build a generic tool that does this? I'll wait to hear if this is of interest to anyone (i.e. if anyone wants to build it jointly), and then start.

Regards

Anand

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 7:13 PM, Thejesh GN <i...@thejeshgn.com> wrote:

[Gautam John]

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 7:43 PM, Thejesh GN <i...@thejeshgn.com> wrote:

> BTW I am working on constitutional amendments over the years. Do you know any place where I can get raw constitutional change data.
> PDFs are okay, I will convert to text. I will probably load it into a mercurial and get diff.

Wondering if http://www.indiankanoon.org/doc/237570/ might help?

Will see if I can find you just the amendments.

[Thejesh GN]

I want to compare versions of constitution where I can see the diff between any versions along with other details.

Mercurial has a beautiful python API. Can we use it?

--
Thanks,
Thejesh GN
http://thejeshgn.com
This is nexus one...

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>>
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[Thejesh GN]

All amendments are listed here
RT @karmadude @thej this is the resource I used for the amendments. http://t.co/gaSbOCG

Can we apply it as patch on original constitution ? ;)

--
Thanks,
Thejesh GN
http://thejeshgn.com
This is nexus one...

[Ravi Atluri]

Talking about the differences part. 

From my knowledge of the Acts and their Amendments. When an Amendment is released, they are separate documents which amend the sections or the articles in a Act. 

And it's not always the case that just the Act that gets amended. When an Act gets amended, the Regulations and Standards which are based on an Act may get amended too. 

Also, sometimes when an Amendment is released, it may amend sections and articles from multiple Acts. 

To see the differences from the original Act to it's present form, we would require a tree kind of visualization where Acts, Amendments, Regulations, Standards are data nodes and then there are relationships between the nodes. 

Just curious, Is/has anyone, who's familiar with the legal terminologies, working/worked on visualizing complex documents such as the constitution?

--

Ravi Atluri

[Srikanth Lakshmanan]

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 21:25, Thejesh GN <i...@thejeshgn.com> wrote:

All amendments are listed here
RT @karmadude @thej this is the resource I used for the amendments. http://t.co/gaSbOCG

Can we apply it as patch on original constitution ? ;)

Constitution as repository, various laws as files, amendments as commits, key political personalities as users would be great to visualize with gource[1]. Requires lot of work. Friend of mine and myself were trying Wikipedia edits visualization and *still trying* :(

 

[1] http://code.google.com/p/gource/

--
Regards
Srikanth.L

[Pranesh Prakash]

Every amendment listed as a separate Act/file:
http://indiacode.nic.in/coiweb/coifiles/amendment.htm

Cheers,
Pranesh

++ Thejesh GN [2011-08-31 12:52]:

--
Pranesh Prakash
Programme Manager
Centre for Internet and Society
W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283

[Gautam John]

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 10:21 PM, Ravi Atluri <sonnes...@gmail.com> wrote:

> From my knowledge of the Acts and their Amendments. When an Amendment is
> released, they are separate documents which amend the sections or the
> articles in a Act.

Yes. Thats what the publishers do - to add value by merging the two.
Though sometimes, the ministry might release a merged document too.

> And it's not always the case that just the Act that gets amended. When an
> Act gets amended, the Regulations and Standards which are based on an Act
> may get amended too.

Yes.

> Also, sometimes when an Amendment is released, it may amend sections and
> articles from multiple Acts.

Yes.

> To see the differences from the original Act to it's present form, we would
> require a tree kind of visualization where Acts, Amendments, Regulations,
> Standards are data nodes and then there are relationships between the
> nodes.

> Just curious, Is/has anyone, who's familiar with the legal
> terminologies, working/worked on visualizing complex documents such as
> the constitution?

The only one I have seen is this: https://github.com/divegeek/uscode

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1724487

That said, as best I know, the Constitution Amendment Acts only amend
the Constitution. Happy to be corrected on this but.

The only people I know who might have the base Constitution and then
every successive version is perhaps someone like http://www.ebc.co.in/

[Gautam John]

Just saw this:

http://manybills.researchlabs.ibm.com/

Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/fastcompany/headlines/~3/L_nmVnZlKho/bill-visualization-may-help-unlock-legislative-dealings-in-washington