Spring Martlet 2017

DEVELOPING A NEW
PLATFORM FOR THE STUDY
OF NEGOTIATED TEXTS
On Friday 14 October, Univ Old Member Dr Nicholas Cole (1997,
Classics and History) launched www.quillproject.net, an innovative
online platform for the study of negotiated texts in general and the
negotiation of the United States Constitution in particular. I spent
my summer as Dr Cole’s research assistant, entering the records
of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 into the platform, and
reconstructing the process of negotiating this iconic document.
I first met Dr Cole when I was a second year undergraduate at Univ.
Unable to choose from the vast list of General History papers for
Finals, I settled on ‘Britain’s North American Colonies from Settlement
to Independence’ and was sent to him for tutorials at Pembroke
College where he is Senior Research Fellow. Already convinced of my
vocation for German cultural history, I was taken unawares in Trinity
Term 2015 by a fascination with early America. Our tutorials opened
up an age defined, on the one hand, by swashbuckling revolutionary
heroism and political brilliance, and marred, on the other, by the
spectres of Atlantic slavery and the brutal colonization of native lands.
As Finals approached, Dr Cole convinced me that there was work
yet to be done on this contradictory era. While helping me with
my application for the MSt in US History, he let slip a few details of
a research project he was undertaking. Would I like a summer job
doing some data entry? Absolutely, I replied. A few weeks of typing
the records into a computer would make me a little extra cash, then
I would hand the work over to the other research assistants he was
planning to employ and spend the rest of my post-Finals vacation
doing as little history as possible.
Little did I know that my relaxed summer job would turn into a threemonth
stint of re-editing some of the most difficult historical sources
I had yet used. My peaceful post-Finals summer became a microcosm
of life as an academic historian: navigating incomplete records,
negotiating funding arrangements, hunting down potential donors and
collaborators, and organising the October conference at which the
project would be launched. Difficult questions hung over our heads:
would the records be complete enough to allow us to reconstruct
the entire process of negotiating the US Constitution? Would our
representation of the Convention provide new interpretative angles
to rival or overtake traditional narrative histories? To round off this
challenging summer, Dr Cole offered me the opportunity to give my
first ever conference paper at Quill’s Pembroke College launch event,
in which I attempted to answer these questions.
Like other digital humanities projects, Quill allows researchers
access to documents, and links together transcriptions, manuscripts,
and other resources from across the web. Unlike many of them,
however, it seeks from the outset to provide new ways into
old sources. The Quill platform allows the reader to view the
negotiation of documents by parliamentary procedure in detail,
mapping the decision-making processes that create constitutions,
laws, and treaties. By entering the minutes of the 1787 negotiations
into the platform, we have been able to reconstruct the text
produced by the Convention at each stage of its amendment and
view the context of particular speeches with an unprecedented
precision. The platform transforms access to the voting records
(extremely confusing in print), and shows which of the Convention’s
delegates were most active in drafting the document – we
discovered that the most influential actors were not necessarily
those best known to us today!
The key motivation behind the project was to improve access to and
understanding of documents central to national and global histories. The
importance of civic education has recently been dramatically highlighted.
The Quill team hopes to reconstruct the negotiations of texts ranging
from the 1832 Reform Act to the Iraq Constitution of 2005, and aims
to offer easy and enlightening access to fundamental legal documents to
historians, lawyers, teachers, and students around the world.
Grace Mallon (2013, History)
THE MARTLET | SPRING 2017 33