University of Chicago Law School: The Electronic Projects Blog

Faculty Book Recommendations, 2012 Edition

For the last few years, as an end-of-the-year gift to the Law School community, we've been collecting book recommendations from our eminent faculty. Our alumni and our Goodreads friends receive the recommendations first, but we also love to share this gift with the rest of the world. As usual, the faculty's responses this year ranged from the serious and topical (tomes on history, current events, and [surprise!] law) to the whimsical (westerns, magical realism, mystery, and more). Check out the 2012 faculty recommendations here, or become our friend on Goodreads and browse a wealth of Law School-related books and recommendations from past years.

TweetChicago is Dead. Long Live TweetChicago!

Way back in 2008 (when you still had to explain to people what Twitter was), we launched TweetChicago, a site intended to give visitors a glimpse into life at the Law School by aggregating the Twitter feeds of a dozen or so students and faculty members. Now that Twitter has become ubiquitous and so many members of our community are participating in it, we've decided to shift the mission of TweetChicago a bit. The new TweetChicago will serve as a directory of as many Law School-affiliated Twitter accounts as our community cares to submit, from students, faculty, and staff to student organizations and alumni. Anyone can submit their account for inclusion, though we do reserve the right to not include inappropriate accounts. If you have a CNET ID, you can submit your info here, or if you don't have a CNET ID you can email webupdate@law.uchicago.edu with your Twitter handle and Law School affiliation.

We look forward tweeting with you!

A New Way to Browse UChicagoLaw Audio

One of our favorite ways to share the UChicago Law experience with the world is through audio recordings of lectures and informal talks by both our own faculty and some of the very distinguished visitors we've hosted. From academic conferences to visits by Supreme Court Justices, the Law School is bursting at the seams with fascinating voices. We've been recording audio regularly since 2005, and have accumulated nearly 300 (!) audio files on our website. With that much amazing content, it can be a little daunting to know where to start, so we've added some new functionality to help you find the material that is most interesting to you. On our audio page, you can now search by keyword, date posted, or event category. Want to find all of the Coase Lectures in Law and Economics, talks dealing with "international law," or just everything we posted in, say, 2007? Now you can.

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to keep up with the great audio content being produced at the Law School: you can subscribe to the Faculty Podcast or the Student Events Podcast, "like" us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

Introducing "The Advocate," the new clinic blog

The Law School has greatly expanded its clinical offerings this academic year, adding the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic, the Gendered Violence and the Law Clinic, the Poverty and Housing Law Clinic, and the Prosecution and Defense Clinic to the already formidable list of clinics that call the Kane Center home. Keeping track of the accomplishments of all of these fine programs could keep you occupied for hours, but luckily the Kane Center staff have started a new blog on the Law School's website. Named "The Advocate" in honor of the print publication published by the clinics until 2006, this blog will keep the Law School community abreast of the challenges and triumphs of the students and faculty involved with these programs.

 

New Year, New Home Page

If you've been to the Law School's website lately, you may have noticed that just before the New Year, we quietly rolled out a new look for the site's home page. Highlights of the new design include:

• a striking new emphasis on the photographs accompanying our featured stories
• a streamlined and simplified information architecture
• more real estate devoted to publicizing our faculty's research
• removal of the old "News," "Audio," "Video" sections in favor of a "News & Media" column, which will aggregate not only those content types, but also blogs hosted both on our site (e.g. Accolades & Achievements) and elsewhere (the D'Angelo Library Blog, the Becker-Posner Blog, etc.) and other types of content that are updated regularly (such as The Record and Faculty Research).

Here in the Commmunications office, we're very happy with the changes. We feel that the new page, designed by Rogue Element, Inc. (the same firm that designed the previous home page and the rest of the site) continues to give visitors a glimpse of the vibrancy of the Law School, while making it easier for them to find the information they're seeking. But we want to know what you think -- please let us know in the comments.

Introducing the Law School's New Mobile Site

Today we're happy to officially unveil the Law School's new mobile-optimized website. Users accessing the Law School's website from a mobile device (with the exception of iPads) will now be automatically redirected to a version of our website that is specifically designed with mobile users in mind. How so? It features:

• A re-imagined information architecture, making it easy to find the information that, according to our research, is what our mobile users are usually looking for.
• Fewer images and other bells-and-whistles, so pages load more quickly (and with less drain on your data plan).
• Quick and easy means to find your way to and from the Law School, or to get contact information for faculty and staff.

Like all websites, our mobile site is a work in progress, so we welcome your feedback on how we can best enable your use of mobile devices to access the site.

When developing an institution's mobile presence, there are many options. You can, for example, build native apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc. as the University has done; and certainly, there are advantages to that approach. However, given the limited staff for this project and the increasing proliferation of new mobile devices, we wanted to create a mobile presence that would be platform-independent (i.e., viewable on all devices, from iPhones to Droids to Blackberries, etc.). Luckily, the content management system we use for the Law School's website, Drupal, is flexible, robust, and supported by an incredible community of contributors. By plugging in the Mobile Tools module and a modified version of the Mobile Garland theme, we were able to easily create a mobile site that serves up the same data as our standard site, repackaged in a mobile-friendly fashion.

Who @UChicagoLaw Follows, and Why

You might have noticed that the Law School's main twitter account has a lot of Twitter followers (nearly 5000 as of this writing), and also follows a lot of people. But we don't follow everyone who follows us. Why not? Because we feel that Twitter is as much about listening as it is about broadcasting, and we want to be able to hear what the people who are interested in our content are saying and to be able to converse with them when appropriate. To do that, we need to be able to slow down the firehose and filter out the signal from the noise. While we have no hard-and-fast rules and each decision is made individually, below are some of the things we consider when we decide whether or not to follow someone back.

In general, we will follow you if:

• You appear to be a real person. Hint: a photo and a bio go a long way toward establishing that fact.
• We know you are a student or an alum.
• Your feed consists of more than links to other people's content. We are especially excited to see you in conversation with other users.
• You are following us because you are interested in our content. If your feed provides evidence that you are engaged in the sorts of issues we tweet about, we'll be a lot more eager to add your stream to the river of tweets we encounter every day.

In general, we will not follow you if:

•  You are a spambot, or your account is used purely for the promotion of goods or services. We tend to see a lot of follows from law firms whose entire feeds consist of "So-and-so provides personal injury counsel in the area of Such-and-such County," over and over again. We do make an exception for other law schools and libraries, who usually provide links to quality content that may be of interest to our community.
• Your account is protected. We figure that if you don't want most people to see some of the stuff you're tweeting, you probably don't want us to see it.
• You have never actually tweeted. Not much point in us following you, then, is there?
• You tweet primarily in a language other than English. This is entirely our failing, rather than yours. We wish we had staff that could read the dozens of languages spoken by our followers, but alas, we do not. Tweets in languages we can't read could quickly begin to drown out those that we are capable of interacting with, and we would all be the worse for it.

What do you think of these lists? Do you have guidelines for which accounts you will or won't follow?

Alumnipalooza! The New and Improved "Accolades & Achievements"

Here at the Law School, we love our alumni. We love them so much, in fact, that until now we had two different places on our website where we were compiling alumni updates and profiles: aside from our Accolades & Achievements blog, we also had a section of the site called "The 50-Year Plan," which included longer profiles from The Record, our alumni magazine. As of today we've consolidated the two, merging the Record profiles into Accolades & Achievements, and making Accolades & Achievements much easier to use. Want to see only updates from your class year, or only posts mentioning the phrase "Supreme Court"? Just use the handy-dandy filters provided on the Accolades & Achievements home page. If you so desire, you can also see only profiles that were contained in The Record, or  ones from a specific issue. Take a look, and let us know what you think!

Help us evolve the Law School's home page!

The Communications office is currently mulling some changes to the Law School's home page. Before we do anything, though, we want to know what you think. Please take two minutes to fill out this short survey so that we can ensure the you get the most out of your experience on our website.

Spotlight on Faculty Research

You may have noticed that, in an ongoing effort to promote the scholarship of our distinguished faculty, the Law School’s website is now highlighting faculty research on our  home page. A small archive of abstracts of articles is now live; aside from being featured on the website, these abstracts are also featured on the digital signage in the library tower, and will be automatically fed into our Facebook and Twitter streams.
 
At the moment, the Communications office finds most of this content by periodically checking SSRN for new uploads (the archive currently features articles uploaded to SSRN in the last 3-4 months). Faculty who have research that they would like us to highlight that is not included in SSRN should email me with the article’s title, coauthors (if any) and either a link to where it can be found on the web or a PDF that we can upload to the website. We are also happy to promote longer-form pieces such as books, though our methods for doing so will be different than those for promoting articles; please get in touch with myself or Marsha Nagorsky to discuss if you have a book coming out that you would like us to promote.