The Quill Project: Modelling and Visualizing the Creation of the American Constitution

Dr Nicholas Cole and Dr Alfie Abdul-Rahman discuss the Quill Project, a software platform developed to aid research and teaching of the history of Parliamentary-style negotiations, and particularuarly the creation of the Constitution of the United States. They will discuss the research problems that the platform was created to address, and the process of building the tools for both data-entry and a diverse readership. We will address the design-choices that we have adopted to encourage a consistent use of the model, and the features that we have built into the platform to facilitate a cooperative relationship with other digital projects. They will discuss the problems of user-interface design for a potential readership that includes high-school students through to subject-domain experts through an analysis of the user requirements and specifications. This talk is aimed at a non-expert audience.