A Digital Model of Constitutions: The Quill Project
Location
Room 207/205. Utah State University, Logan, UT
Document Type
Poster
Start Date
23-2-2018 3:30 PM
End Date
23-2-2018 4:00 PM
Description
We, three undergraduate students working on the Oxford Quill Project under the direction of UVU’s Center for Constitutional Studies, would like to make a presentation introducing this unique example of digital humanities techniques. We would prefer to give a traditional presentation, but we are open to a poster presentation.
The Oxford Quill Project is an internet platform available to the public. It is a digital tool that takes existing texts of forbiddingly complicated debate, i.e. convention debate records, and translates them into a form that is both a) easier for the beginning student, and b) more capable of launching complex research projects for the advanced student. It could well become the primary 21st-century tool for the study of constitutional conventions and other “negotiated documents.” Through a system of icons and visual maps, it models the delegate debates and decisions during constitutional conventions, and generally makes the proceedings of conventions more easier to understand. At every step, the user may refer back to the relevant text of the debates, and see which parts of the final document are under development.
We are currently working with Dr. Nicholas Cole, the senior research fellow at Oxford University who heads the Project, to model the proceedings of the Utah Constitutional Convention of 1895. This work requires close interpretation of parliamentary debates from original historical sources. The records of these debates are made available to the public online, but presently, to get any sense of the main flow of development, one must either consult (rare) scholarly summaries, or oneself seek to work through the back-and-forth discussion over the course of the 56 days. Our work, when completed, will allow a quicker study of the convention’s work, and will enable the user to ascertain precisely how any given provision came to be a part of the final constitution.
Last year, another team of Center for Constitutional Studies student assistants did similar work on the United States Convention of 1787. Future document negotiations projected to be modelled include the U.S. Bill of Rights, the Indian Constitution of 1949, and perhaps the present “Brexit” negotiations. We suspect that other digital platforms similar to the Quill Project, or the Quill Project itself, since it presently stands alone in this field, will eventually come to model almost all constitutional conventions for which records exist. We believe it will become a tool that scholars the world over will utilize, and thus that its impact on the humanities-connected disciplines of political science, history, and law is going to be significant.
Our presentation will illustrate how the Quill platform is used, and how texts are “translated” into it. Our illustrations will be primarily taken from the Utah Constitutional Convention, and thus attendees will learn a bit more about Utah history, and see how this approach to constitutional studies can heighten awareness of perspectives distinct to particular regions.
A Digital Model of Constitutions: The Quill Project
Room 207/205. Utah State University, Logan, UT
We, three undergraduate students working on the Oxford Quill Project under the direction of UVU’s Center for Constitutional Studies, would like to make a presentation introducing this unique example of digital humanities techniques. We would prefer to give a traditional presentation, but we are open to a poster presentation.
The Oxford Quill Project is an internet platform available to the public. It is a digital tool that takes existing texts of forbiddingly complicated debate, i.e. convention debate records, and translates them into a form that is both a) easier for the beginning student, and b) more capable of launching complex research projects for the advanced student. It could well become the primary 21st-century tool for the study of constitutional conventions and other “negotiated documents.” Through a system of icons and visual maps, it models the delegate debates and decisions during constitutional conventions, and generally makes the proceedings of conventions more easier to understand. At every step, the user may refer back to the relevant text of the debates, and see which parts of the final document are under development.
We are currently working with Dr. Nicholas Cole, the senior research fellow at Oxford University who heads the Project, to model the proceedings of the Utah Constitutional Convention of 1895. This work requires close interpretation of parliamentary debates from original historical sources. The records of these debates are made available to the public online, but presently, to get any sense of the main flow of development, one must either consult (rare) scholarly summaries, or oneself seek to work through the back-and-forth discussion over the course of the 56 days. Our work, when completed, will allow a quicker study of the convention’s work, and will enable the user to ascertain precisely how any given provision came to be a part of the final constitution.
Last year, another team of Center for Constitutional Studies student assistants did similar work on the United States Convention of 1787. Future document negotiations projected to be modelled include the U.S. Bill of Rights, the Indian Constitution of 1949, and perhaps the present “Brexit” negotiations. We suspect that other digital platforms similar to the Quill Project, or the Quill Project itself, since it presently stands alone in this field, will eventually come to model almost all constitutional conventions for which records exist. We believe it will become a tool that scholars the world over will utilize, and thus that its impact on the humanities-connected disciplines of political science, history, and law is going to be significant.
Our presentation will illustrate how the Quill platform is used, and how texts are “translated” into it. Our illustrations will be primarily taken from the Utah Constitutional Convention, and thus attendees will learn a bit more about Utah history, and see how this approach to constitutional studies can heighten awareness of perspectives distinct to particular regions.