The Quill Project Launches Negotiated Texts Network with TORCH

NEWS |

The Quill Project is spearheading a Negotiated Texts Network, funded by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). This network is an exciting new step for Quill, and highlights their ethos of collaboration and their emphasis on sharing knowledge.

It will bring together researchers working with formal negotiations and will be particularly useful for those using digital and statistical methodologies for research, alongside those using digital platforms in teaching or public engagement contexts.

Quill was launched in October 2016. The platform enables users to explore the process of formal negotiation. Through its flagship venture, the Quill Project aspires to transform the study and teaching of the history of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, and subsequent negotiated texts. These documents of American constitutional law are being made widely accessible via the software platform, ‘Quill’, promoting an innovative approach to the study of these foundational legal texts.

The Negotiated Texts Network emphasises collaboration between projects and the integration of data sets across platforms in order to improve user experience. It will be an opportunity to refine and develop understanding of the problems this material poses for researchers, to promote an awareness of the tools for their exploration and investigate new means of building and integrating such tools. The network will also allow researchers to consider new ways of presenting and making accessible these materials to non-expert audiences.

Speaking about the network’s launch, the founder of the Quill Project, Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke Dr Nicholas Cole, said:

‘We are very grateful to TORCH for its support.  In the next phase of development, we are aiming to make our software tools useful for those looking at a wider range of texts, such as foreign-language material or the writing of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. This grant will help us integrate our tools with those provided by other projects.  We believe that there is enormous potential for digital-humanities projects to achieve even more through cooperation and the sharing of both data and ideas, and this network grant will help us develop key relationships both in the UK and beyond.’

The Quill Project is holding an upcoming workshop at the Bodelian Library called 'Representing and Exploring Negotiated Texts' on 25th January, 2017. Book your place now on the Bodleian's website.