Introduction Access to Information and Freedom of Information (ATI/FOI) requests are valuable sources of data for academic, journalistic, and advocacy purposes. The laws that entitle citizens (and ...
Archiving access to information and freedom of information requests
Cleaning legislation for computational analysis
Introduction My last post used the example of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) to show how to scrape different versions of legislative texts. For my research, I went ahead and...
Scraping legislation to analyse changes over time
Introduction Laws change over time. Governments frequently amend legislation and it can be hard to keep track of what has changed and when. The current verison of a given law shows traces of these ...
TTC security incidents dataset
Violence on public transit is attracting a lot of media attention in recent days. Toronto (where I live) is no exception. After seeing several sensational headlines and a stories relying on top-lin...
Access to information research in the digital era
Luscombe, Alex, and Duncan, Jamie. 2023. “Access to Information Research in the Digital Era.” Canadian Public Administration. 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1111/capa.12518 “In the four decades since...
Data rights will not save democracy
This opinion piece originally appeared in the Globe and Mail. Jamie Duncan is a PhD student at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. Wendy H. Wong is a p...
Facebook’s metaverse won’t be bound by physical borders – neither are human rights
This opinion piece originally appeared in The Globe and Mail. Wendy H. Wong is a professor of political science, the Canada research chair in global governance and civil society and the research l...