University of Chicago Law School: The Electronic Projects Blog

Law School website down

Due to power issues on campus, the Law School's website is currently down. Facilities and IT Services are working on rectifying the situation.

Update, 9:14am: please see http://www.uchicago.edu/emergency/ for details.

Update, 9:29am: The Law School's website is back up and running. Thanks for your patience!

Pressing Rewind on UChicagoLaw's Audio

This week we launched an overhaul of how audio is stored, presented, and discovered on the UChicagoLaw website.

Chicago was a pioneer among law schools in terms of posting audio content, when it started posting recordings to the Faculty Blog back in 2005. Since then, we've assembled a library of over 400 files, that have been downloaded somewhere north of 1 million times. Dedicating all of that bandwidth to audio was starting to take a toll on the rest of our website, so we decided to take a cue from NPR and start migrating our files to Soundcloud. Two months later (and yes, I moved each one of those 400+ files by hand), our Soundcloud page is finally ready for prime-time. We'll keep posting audio to pages on our website, but we'll now be doing so as embedded Soundcloud widgets instead of via a player run through the audio module on our website. In addition to improving our site's performance, we expect that using Soundcloud will make our audio easier to share (look for the "share track" link on the individual widgets) and make it more accessible to those on mobile devices, as well as expose our content to a whole new audience in the Soundcloud community. 

The move has required some changes. Our podcast feed will now be served from Soundcloud rather than our own website, and we are only permitted one feed per account, so we will be retiring "Open Minds: The Student Events Podcast," due to low subscription numbers. We will still be posting recordings of student events to Soundcloud and our website, however.

We've also made some tweaks to how users can find audio on our website by making it easier to reach the audio archives homepage from every audio page on the site, as well as by showing links to the five most recently added audio files on each of those audio pages. 

So, bottom line: what does all of this mean for the methods by which you can stay up-to-date with all of the all of the great audio content the Law School is creating?

On our site: Visit our Audio Archives page to browse through the hundreds of audio pages located there. You can also find a link to the Audio Archives on the homepage of the website, where you will also see newly available audio listed in the "News & Media" scroll.

On Soundcloud: If you happen to be a member of Soundcloud you can follow us there; even if you don't have an account, you can add comments directly to points in time of the audio file, or view playlists we've set up for things like Chicago's Best Ideas or the recent conference on Crime in Law and Literature.

On iTunes: You can subscribe to our Faculty Podcast and get a new talk by our distinguished faculty or very special guests downloaded automatically to your phone or computer every two weeks.

On any other podcatcher or rss reader, or even email: You can subscribe just like iTunes, but Apple-free.

Have questions, comments, or concerns? We look forward to hearing them.

A New Look for the Clinic Website

The web presence for the Law School's clinical programs got an overhaul this week, as Clinic staff and the Office of Communications worked together to refine both the information architecture and the visual design of the site to better tell the compelling stories of all the amazing work that our clinics do. Check out the new site at http://www.law.uchicago.edu/clinics/.

Introducing (Finally) the Law School's YouTube Channel

Sometimes, when choosing social and software platforms, one chooses... poorly. That would seem to have been the case with the Law School's choice of video distribution, a choice that we are happy to rectify today with the official launch of our YouTube Channel.

While it might seem we're a bit late to the YouTube party, the problem is that we were actually a bit too early. When the Law School began regularly recording video of events like our Chicago's Best Ideas lecture series back in 2008, YouTube had a 10-minute limit to videos that users could upload. Since most of our videos are of hour-long lectures, we had to find a new solution. We tried Google Video (this was before Google bought YouTube) but it didn't work terribly well. Eventually we found Blip.tv, which did pretty much everything we wanted it to: allowed for long-duration uploads, integrated with our Drupal site, allowed for ad-free display, and so on.

While we did claim a YouTube channel and used it for various projects here and there, we stuck with Blip as our main video platform through the years, even after YouTube dropped their 10-minute limit and universities (including our own) began flocking to the service in droves, since we had already sunk so much time and effort into establishing our Blip presence. But a couple of months ago, Blip began mandating pre-roll ads before every video, a practice we found unacceptable for our non-profit institution. So, after five years and just under 60,000 views on their platform, we've decided to pull the plug on our Blip channel. I've spent the last few weeks porting our hundred and forty-odd videos over to YouTube, and look forward to all of the opportunities that the new (to us) platform provides: easier sharing, more opportunities for conversation, and so on. We hope you'll take a look, perhaps subscribe so you don't miss anything, and let us know what you think!

Breaking Down #UChiLaw13

The Law School has had a robust social media presence for quite a few years now, but we've never really attempted to do a full social media offensive for an event like graduation. Mostly, this is due to the fact that our staff is so small that graduation is an all-hands-on-deck sort of event, so having anyone devoting themselves to social media during the ceremony is a luxury we can't really afford. This year was no different, but, inspired by stories I heard at HighEdWeb Michigan of some of the commencement social media wins pulled off by other institutions, I decided it was time to take on the challenge anyway. By most every measure, we had a fairly successful go at it, especially considering the dearth of resources that we had to throw at the task (the sum total of which was basically my iPhone and me). Here are some things I think we did right:

• Coordinate with larger units. I reached out to the University's social media curator very early on, to make sure that a) we wouldn't be duplicating hashtags, and b) on the day of graduation, when our #uchilaw13 hashtag started popping up next to the University's #uchigrad13 hashtag, they would know what the heck it meant.
• Start rolling out your hashtag early. We wanted to get the hashtag lodged in the brain of our audience as best we could beforehand, so we began a couple of weeks before the big day by including our hashtag on the Facebook event we had created. We also created and promoted a Spotify playlist called #UChiLaw13 about a week before graduation, and in the days leading up to it posted a couple of Instagram photos and a Vine tour of Rockefeller Chapel using the hashtag.
• Don't be afraid to try new things. This was our first time using Spotify, Instagram, and Vine as social platforms for the Law School. We weren't sure what their adoption rates have been yet for our community, but figured that this would be a good opportunity to try them out as low-risk, high upside social options. Instagram was especially successful, I think, since it allowed us to cross-post photos to both Facebook and Twitter as well.
• Create a central hub from which your audience can find you on the platform of their choice. Since we were using so many different platforms, we created a page on the website called #UChiLaw13 (where we also embedded our streaming simulcast) that listed most the different ways to get social around this event. We also used Tagboard as a way to aggregate all of these channels; this proved especially useful on the day of the event as a way to track everything that was going on.  
• Make sure you reach out to your audience. We made certain that the graduating student we knew to be on Twitter knew about the hashtag by @'ing them a couple of days before, asking if they were getting excited yet; we also let all of our faculty know about the hashtag the morning of graduation, and were pretty successful in getting them to pick it up.

Some stats, as of 6/18:

Facebook

• "People Talking About This Page" up 261% from the previous week, Weekly Total Reach up 88%
• Total reach for all #UChiLaw13-related posts: 23,250, of which 4,072 were viral; 1624 engaged users (about 7% of users reached)
• Posts from the day of graduation: 10,213 reached, of which 899 were viral; 854 engaged users (about 8% of users reached)
• By way of comparison, during the month leading up to and including graduation last year, our engagement was 3.5% of reach.

Other platforms:

• 93 posts using hashtag across all platforms
• 792 visits to uchilaw13 page
• 443 views of Storify recap
• 126 clicks on Spotify playlist
• 63 clicks on Tagboard link

So what do you think? Did we try to do too much? Too little? How can we improve the social media experience for next year's graduation? 

Introducing "Research Matters"

In conjunction with the abstracts of faculty research that we've been posting on the Law School website for some time now, we've recently added a new biweekly feature called "Research Matters," in which a faculty member discusses one of their works and its impact and relevance to the law and to society in general. The first four pieces include Nicholas Stephanopoulos on "The Consequences of Consequentialist Criteria," Alison LaCroix on "The Interbellum Constitution and the Spending Power," Aziz Huq on "Removal as a Political Question," and Randy Picker on "Access and the Public Domain." Keep an eye on the Faculty Research page for new postings.

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 [email protected] 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.