Book of Abstracts zur Konferenz Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum 2016 A Visual Approach to the History of Swiss Federal Law Ourednik, André Andre.Ourednik@bar.admin.ch Schweizer Bundesarchiv Nellen, Stefan Stefan.Nellen@bar.admin.ch Schweizer Bundesarchiv Fleer, Peter Peter.Fleer@bar.admin.ch Schweizer Bundesarchiv The complexity of law is a recurring problem faced by government bodies, judges, lawyers, jurists and, in fact, all citizens confronted with legal issues. Ideally, the application of laws should be in line with the ideals of the society that formulates them. Whether this ideal is satisfied or not depends on many factors, among which the structure of the legal system, the quantity of its resources, or the competence of law interpreters. But it also depends on the form of the laws themselves. The equilibrium of law-writing consists in remaining intelligible while accounting for the great diversity of social situations subject to legislation. It must “find an optimal balance between rigorousness and flexibility, formality and understandability, that is, between expressing authority and yet being grounded in the everyday life of those affected by it” (Höfler / Piotrowski 2011). Problems induced by excessive complexity of law are well identified in legal literature (Epstein 1995; Kades 1996; Katz / Bommarito 2013; Palmirani / Cervone 2014). They have also been drawn to public attention. Complaints about “overlegislation”, meaning the rising quantity and complexity of law, have been formulated in recent years by national media in Switzerland, partially reflecting public opinion and the views of several politicians ( e.g. Zurlinden 2013-2015c). Our question, focused on the Swiss Federal Law, is both formal and historical. We ask whether the degree of its complexity can be measured over time and how it can be represented. How could we, for example, identify specific domains of the Federal Law in which complexity has evolved more than in others? What would this evolution mean in historical terms? In a larger scope, we ask to which extent the history of legislation can be understood with the help of quantitative methods. Since 1848, the Swiss federal government publishes legal instruments in 3 national languages (German, French, Italian) and in 3 principal publications: the Federal Gazette, a weekly report of the Federal Council and law drafts proposed to the Federal Assembly, the legally binding Official Compilation (OC), a record of actual changes to the federal law in chronological order, updated every week; finally the trimestral Systematic compilation, in thematic order and representing the current state of federal law. Texts are partitioned in structural units (chapters, sections, articles, paragraphs, sentences and enumeration items) unequivocally identified by a reference code ( e.g. SR 313.0, art. 29, §1, al. a) equivalent for all language versions. Working with the OC allows us to observe the chronological development of law on a weekly basis. The OC is available since 1998 in digital format convertible to hierarchically structured XML by an XSLT transformation. Prior to 1998, the Swiss federal archives (SFA) dispose of paper version of the OC. This repository is currently being scanned in the scope of our project. Fields recognition (Figure 1) and OCR is applied to obtain, here also, structured XML (Figure 2). This XML representation of the introduction of a new law at a given time allows a data analysis with the R statistical programming tool, the extraction of its results to a data format (JSON, cf. ECMA 2013) exploitable by the visualization framework D3. We can visualize laws in the form of a hierarchical tree proceeding from the whole body of the text – at the center of the figure – deployed into lower level structural units (Figure 3). This gives us a structural overview of any given law. The next step of our work consisted in determining a means to measure the growth or regression of any given law over time. What we are interested in is not only the absolute size of the law but, more generally, the degree of difficulty it can represent for a comprehensive overview by individuals deemed to conform to it or to apply it in the case of legal litigation. Beyond this practical aspect, it is also our wish, and our theoretical posture, to understand laws as organic actants (Callon 1986; Latour 1984, 1996), who prosper or regress in a dialectical relationship with the evolution of their “environment” (Ourednik 2010: §2.3.4.1, §2.2.4.2.), i.e. in relation to the context of other laws, superior ( e.g. international) laws, as well as in relation to the social, cultural and economic climate. This posture allows us to speak about growth and regression of laws. Further, considering the dialectical relationship between an actant and its environment, one relatum can be taken as an index (Peirce et al. 1934) of the other. More specifically, observing the evolution of a law allow us to formulate historical hypotheses about the evolution of its environment. The question is what quantitative variables can be used to measure the evolution of a law. In literature, we can distinguish between two approaches: measured and based on textual statistics partially inspired by information theory and measures based on the spatiotemporal extent of law application. Among the textual measures, Katz and Bommarito (2013) suggest the use of total text length, average word length, Shannon entropy of word use, depth of the hierarchical structure and density of external references.