“Text as data” in law and courts: data coding, language clarity, and data sharing

This chapter explores what treating “text as data” has to offer legal scholarship. It begins by highlighting the challenges of human coding and proposes how a computerized approach offers new insights. It does so by offering examples from the literature. It then shifts to focus on the tensions created by computer text analysis. Specifically, it discusses data coding issues created by computers, with a specific emphasis on concept measurement. It explains the basic model that text as data researchers commonly use and the known challenges with it. From there, the chapter examines the challenge of losing the clarity or meaning of text when treating text as data, and identifies the tensions with sharing data for text as data scholars. It identifies some new directions that researchers are pursuing in these areas, and the challenges they will have to overcome.