New Digital Resource ‘Quill’ Spearheaded by Dr Nicholas Cole Transforms the Study and Teaching of Negotiated Legal Texts

The new digital resource,  ‘Quill’, spearheaded by Pembroke Senior Research Fellow, Dr Nicholas Cole, is a platform for the study of negotiated texts, which places emphasis on recreating the context within which decisions were made. 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 will be made widely accessible via the software platform, ‘Quill’, promoting an innovative approach to the study of these foundational legal texts.

The resource will benefit a diverse audience. Speaking of the project Dr Cole said,

‘The ability to offer students an exact reconstruction of debates transforms their ability to understand quickly what can otherwise seem dry and remote sources.  We are also extremely pleased to be offering researchers the tools they need to analyse this material with a precision and speed that has simply not been possible before. Our work with other digital projects and with non-profit organization proves the value of co-operation between digital-humanities and public-education projects, and we have pioneered ways of working that have opened up new possibilities for collaboration by students working on other sides of the world.’

This year the project team will refine the current presentation of the records online, and integrate this with classroom materials. The material surrounding the creation of the Bill of Rights will be published in the next academic year.

Kat Howarth, a recent graduate of Pembroke in Law, is currently working as a Research Assistant for the Quill Project. Speaking about her work she says,

‘Every day brings new challenges and new rewards. As a recent Law graduate, I knew how case law worked and how to find case notes, but had little familiarity with historical primary sources such as Max Farrand's version of the Records of the Federal Convention. I had even less familiarity with coding, either in Python or Javascript (the two codes the Quill Platform was built with), but found myself splitting my time between searching through contemporary US Supreme Court rulings, checking over data entry using a hard copy of Farrand's Records, and searching through the platform to find 'bugs' in the coding and see whether the graphics worked in various different browsers. 

Overall, my time spent with Quill and with the Records of the Constitutional Convention has given me a fantastic insight into a topic I knew little about to start with, and in the future will allow me to help with comparative research using (former Pembrokian) Blackstone's Commentaries, and individual State Constitutions from the time.’

Earlier this month, Pembroke hosted a conference to mark the launch of the project, bringing together a range of academics. According to Grace Mallon’s summary of the conference, the event aimed to ‘confront the possibilities and limitations of digital platforms, both for scholarship and for broader public education’  by directly addressing several aspects of the Quill Project: the current ecosystem of publications that present eighteenth- and nineteenth-century legal texts (an ecosystem addressed by ConSource, Marc Alexander and the Electronic Enlightenment); research questions in early American History and the challenge of engaging with a broader public and younger scholars.

Click here to use the ‘Quill’ resource and find the project on Facebook.

The Quill Project is a collaboration between Pembroke Senior Research Fellow Dr Nicholas Cole (Faculty of History), Dr James Cummings (IT Services), and the Oxford E-Research Centre's Research Associate Dr Alfie Abdul-Rahman.