Agasha Ratam

Agasha Ratam is a rising senior at Yale, primarily studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

As a JURIST Digital Scholar, Agasha aims to study how readability and other related factors affect the accessibility of legal articles. Popular websites often emphasize the readability of articles as a means to reach a wider audience. Especially for legal news articles where field-specific terminologies are ubiquitous, improving readability may be important to ensure that an article is accessible to the general public.

The goal of this project is to extract insights from JURIST’s historical articles and Google Analytics data and to inform legal-news writers of possible writing strategies they can implement in their articles to reach a broader audience. The first step of this project is establishing a scale that captures how accessible a legal news or commentary article is to the general public. This scale will likely take into account user engagement metrics, including page views, time spent on the page, and exit rate. Afterward, predictors related to readability will be used to predict the accessibility of articles. This project will also explore the use of neural nets in the prediction process.

Agasha's academic interests include neural nets and data visualization. Last summer, he interned at Vaillant in Remscheid, Germany, where he used neural nets to predict the remaining useful life of heating devices. Agasha grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia, and is currently located in Boston. Outside of academics, this summer he intends to keep himself busy with long-distance running, cooking, and playing guitar.