Interfaces to Support the Scholarly Exploration of Text Collections

The analysis of text collections forms the basis of schol- arship in many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Despite the growing availability of electronic texts, automated techniques have not been effectively exploited to support the activities of scholars in these fields. We present a prototype search interface for exploring text collections that places equal emphasis on content, what the document is about, and metadata, the context that situates a piece of text. As a start, we focus on a selection of briefs and opini- ons from the U.S. Supreme Court to support legal scholars.