The Harris County Robert W. Hainsworth Law Library offers at least two educational sessions each month. These sessions are offered as part of our Legal Tech Institute, a series of learning opportunities for members of the legal community to improve proficiency in law practice technology and other digital skills. Anyone is welcome to attend these courses, but attorneys are the target audience, as we always offer one free hour of Continuing Legal Education credit via the State Bar of Texas MCLE department. Last month, we offered three courses:
Digital Literacy for Legal Work: Evaluating Information to Bridge the Justice Gap
Social Media for Lawyers
Hack Your Legal Research with BOO-lean Operators, Terms, and Connectors
Your client is a landlord, and the tenant is withholding rent because of repairs including a broken toilet, broken refrigerator, and lack of heat. The tenant wrote a letter talking about an implied covenant of habitability. You know of another term, warranty of habitability. Your search for cases might look like the above.
Apparatus of Search
The third program was our special Halloween feature, which playfully incorporated many spooky holiday motifs, while focusing on the benefits of constructing more effective search queries. One of the central themes of the presentation was to convey the power of structured search strings using controlled vocabulary and Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT), the logical conjunctions between keywords, which are used to help narrow or expand the scope of a search.
We also focused on Terms and Connectors, and even studied the anatomy of a search to demonstrate how the commands and connectors work together to produce the most targeted search results for a specific information-seeking goal.
These tools — key terms, Boolean operators, and commands and connectors — are the apparatus of a search. The graphics below illustrate in detail what the specific connectors look like. Also shown are the rules that give structure to a search. When a well-devised search string, consisting of the best combination of components, is executed, the results should be more customized and relevant to the needs of the information seeker.
Apparatus of Play
George Boole was a self-taught logician and philosopher. He was a professor of mathematics at Queen's College in Ireland where, in 1854, he published a foundational work on binary logic called The Laws of Thought. John Venn, another English logician and philosopher, and also a professor of mathematics, published his own groundbreaking work just 12 years later, on probability, called The Logic of Chance. In the 20 years that followed, Professor Venn built on George Boole's theories, and in 1881, he published Symbolic Logic, his work in which he highlighted what would become known as Venn diagrams. In 1880, one of George Boole’s five daughters, married Charles Howard Hinton, a mathematic genius in his own right, who would go on to father Sebastian Hinton, inventor of the jungle gym. Designed to help children better understand dimensional space, Sebastian Hinton’s Climbing Structure can be seen, in its conceptual form, on the patent he filed in July 1920. On October 23, 1923, S. Hinton’s application for an innovative playground apparatus was approved.
Sebastian Hinton’s playground invention was inspired by his observation — and frustration — that children (and people in general) don’t engage with the world in a way that allows for full understanding, manipulation, or conceptual thought about the spaces we inhabit. Moving through space is often linear, he observed. We traverse flat planes, going from point to point, without thoughtfully considering the contours or complexity of our paths. Giving children a tool to experience the world around them in a more abstract and multi-faceted way — while also engaged in play — was his contribution to helping developing minds more intuitively comprehend multidimensionality.
Our goal in sharing the apparatus of search is to help information seekers more intuitively grasp the complexity of sophisticated database queries and to achieve better information outcomes. Constructing complex search strings can be difficult, but building proficiency as an expert-level searcher can be fun! Understanding the multidimensionality of search and leveraging the power of its complexity might even begin to feel like play.
When interacting with a database — or jungle gym — in the future, think of George Boole, John Venn, and Sebastian Hinton and marvel at the multifaceted dimensionality of its structure. Most importantly, however, have fun while you do it!