Visualizing Native Title: Methods for Mapping, Measuring, and Making Meaning
Julie Falck, PhD candidate, Osgoode Hall Law School
Published April 19,
Julie Falck presented a talk entitled Visualizing Native Title Methods for Mapping, Measuring and Making Meaning during a session on ways of doing and making law at the Technologies of Justice Conference, hosted January 26 to 27, 2018 at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa Ontario.
Falck discussed the ability of technology to assist in legal research, specifically in terms of the native title system. She discussed her research on this system, describing the system's past, present and future.
She talked about the different ways to visualize this strategy, and how legal documents in First Nations law can include anything from maps, drawings and Indigenous law, to vast cases of Indigenous storytelling culture. She explained how data visualization, qualitative data coding and traditional legal analysis can provide insight on how the Indigenous title system is working and the results it is producing. She also presented the statutory system and how adding legislative wording to a less-than-complicated problem can cause it to become complicated.
She demonstrated how her team used a case-coding program called InVivo to pull information from a series of historical cases. She described her research results, and how she found different judges approached their role in the process, in different ways of addressing the statutory tests that had to be applied. She presented Tableau Data Visualization and Raw Spatial Data, highlighting the relationships between judgements, cases and spatial information. She explained the benefits of investigating trends and evaluating how the processes are working, as well as investigating how long it takes to finalize cases. She noted that can help discover new knowledge, such as the speed of trials in mediation versus litigation, as well as how events in populated areas tend to be slower because of the increased amounts of respondents.
Falck brought technologies and cases together in relation to Indigenous title, explaining how the content of Indigenous title can be recognized in consent determinations versus litigated determinations, and how very traditional interpretations of Indigenous rights often do not include sovereignty or territory rights. She described how respondents didn't come to the table until they knew they had nothing to lose, leaving the First Nations peoples at a disadvantage. She highlighted how generating insights from research, including anomalies and trends, can help determine where to look for issues and inconsistencies. She concluded by explaining the use of technology not as a tool to generate predictive data, but as something that can be used to map a field and create research on a topic to further studies.
