VizChitra 2025

{Describe your talk/session in 2-3 paragraphs}

Ever wondered what happens to corruption cases against politicians? Or, perhaps, you might wonder if your local police station is investigating cases effectively? Or, maybe if all those election promises of cracking down on drugs, land/sand/alcohol mafia, and post-election action on comedians and “anti-nationals” have gone anywhere?

In this session, we’ll run through how to digitally investigate cases. We’ll cover how to triangulate data from publicly-available court, police and media documents, why triangulation is necessary and the insights such triangulation can offer. In the workshop, we’ll give you an overview of the legal process, sources of legal data, and the kinds of data you can get from these sources. We will then take you through the process of creating a legal dataset from scratch, with real-life examples and practice sets so you can do this yourself going forward.

The skills from the workshop can be used to build datasets built on a foundation of law, to monitor or narrate compelling stories on how the government uses or misuses the power of the law.

{Mention 1-2 takeaways from your session}

• Developing an understanding of what legal data could tell us and the process of judicial decision making.
• An introduction to open source and open access legal databases
• Data Triangulation using media reporting, social media and FIRs,
• Creating your database: Introduction into some housekeeping tech tools.
• Creating compelling narratives out of legal data.

{Who is the audience for your talk/session?}

Journalists and lawyers, and anyone interested in learning how the law operates and how to study and visualise the law in a compelling manner. We assume no prior knowledge of the legal system and the session is designed to help a general audience learn to build legal datasets across varied contexts.

{Add your bio, including work place name and your job role}

The session will be led by Mohit Rao and Gale Andrew.

Mohit is an independent journalist, currently a consultant for SOAS, University of London on a long term research project documenting the social life of law in India. He worked for eight years with The Hindu and has since freelanced for CNN, BBC, DW, Fiftytwo.in, Washington Post, and Mongabay among others. He is interested in writing on issues related to politics, land, and ecology.

Gale is a legal researcher, currently at the Laws of Social Reproduction Project at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London. She graduated from National Law University Delhi and completed her LL.M. at SOAS University of London, followed by a MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Oxford. She worked for several years as a Senior Research Associate at Project 39A, National Law University Delhi leading research on bail, custodial violence, legal aid, and the death penalty. She designed the database tracking death penalty cases in India that is the leading source of statistics on the issue.