Process

I have always asked this about “The ‘CSI Effect’: Does It Really Exist?” The Honorable Donald E. Shelton Chief Judge of Washtenaw County, Michigan and Gregg Barak, Ph.D., and Young Kim, Ph.D., Criminology professors at Eastern Michigan University asked it for me. They surveyed 1,027 jurors prior to their participation in trial processes. The results “indicated that: 46 percent expected to see some kind of scientific evidence in every criminal case, 22 percent expected to see DNA evidence in every criminal case, 36 percent expected to see fingerprint evidence in every criminal case, 32 percent expected to see ballistic or other firearms laboratory evidence in every criminal case” (Shelton, 2008). This is shown below in the graph (Figure 3).

Shelton, D. E. (2008). The 'CSI Effect': Does It Really Exist?. National Institute of Justice Journal, (259), 1-7.

Figure 3 (Shelton, 2008). This a graph that shows the percentage of people of 1,027 jurors who expected different forms of scientific evidence from the prosecution in different types of cases.

Without the necessary equipment to perform most scientific test in the late mid to late 1900’s, DNA evidence should not have been mentioned in writings until we had the experience and the equipment to perform the necessary test properly. The first thing I decided to do was text mine. I used the Time Magazine Corpus which holds 100 million+ words from 1923-2006. I text mined the following words: Scientific evidence, DNA evidence, Fingerprint evidence, Ballistic evidence and DNA based on the graph above. I may come up with more words possibly on my own through my research. I want to see how popular the phrases were and how much more popular they got over time if they did.

I will define what I am text mining and link it to a website that will explain it more than I can. I will then mention what I expected to find. I will post the results. I will then explain what they mean in regards to the point of this website which is that the CSI Effect has had a real affect on the language we used. For all of the keywords, I expects to see a mass jump in the usage around the 2000’s and possibly in the 1990’s. Prior to that, I do not expect to get many results. We will find out what happens together. 

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