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.