BlogModeling Constitutional Conventions: How High School Students and Undergraduates are Conducting Meaningful Political Research
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The U.S. Constitutional Convention is a must-know topic for any United States History class, but what about state constitutional conventions? Relatively little information has been studied about their proceedings, but a decentralized group of researchers is working to change that.
In February of 2021, Conner Huey (then a high school senior) stumbled upon the work of Dr. Nicholas Cole at the University of Oxford. Cole directs the Quill Project, which seeks to model conventions and assemblies globally to understand our world’s legal foundations. Quill developed a platform for reconstructing conventions through records of negotiations, proposals and votes. Its technologies are used by several groups of researchers around the world reconstructing conventions in their respective regions.
When Huey first contacted Cole, the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University—an open enrollment school of about 40,000 students—had recently completed a model of the Utah State Constitution (1895) in collaboration with the Quill Project. The center’s work earned it a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct its work to three other western U.S. states, including Washington, Conner’s home state. Cole was quickly able to onboard Huey with the Washington team.
The project is a great example of how decentralized research initiatives can enhance access to research and scale a project efficiently. The research is decentralized because it compiles contributions from research groups around the world. Undergraduate researchers at Utah Valley University and other politically-minded scholars in Western states like Huey can apply the Quill Project’s research aims and approaches to their local area. They benefit from support and resources from the project established at Oxford, and conducting the Western States Project is only possible because of their local understanding and physical location.
Huey travels around Washington to gather primary sources about the state’s constitutional convention. “I [made] trips back and forth to the University of Washington Special Collections Library to make sure we have the information [needed],” he shared. His day-to-day work consists mostly of reading primary source data to determine the necessary inputs to the model so that it can reconstruct the convention.
Huey has closely collaborated with the team at Utah Valley University, recalling “[they] helped onboard me into the whole process.” The Utah-based researchers are currently finishing their model of Idaho’s convention.
The Western States Project is only one component of the Quill Project. Quill is modeling the writing conventions of documents in Europe like The Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), and it has launched exploratory projects in Australian and Indian constitutional law and development.
Huey is continuing his studies of political history and electoral politics at Harvard University where he intends to pursue a joint concentration in Government and History. “I want to build my skill set to take on this project and pursue studying electoral modern day politics though a PhD,” he added.
GitHub is a popular platform used by computer scientists to manage their collaborative projects, but a similar program does not exist for academic work. There is no standard platform to create work, connect with others, and share work in one place. Most platforms only fall into one or two of these categories.The Jinso collaboration tool is a better way for groups to work on projects. By bringing the entire academic collaboration process onto one tool, it simplifies workflows and communication.The first steps for using the Jinso platform are:
Once a user builds a network, they can create new Groups that consist of their network members. By default, the creator of a group is the admin. The most common Group is a research group, but the platform can manage several other types of academic projects. Platform users can create study groups for sharing course materials or groups of club members for extracurricular work.The admin of the Group has the ability to add new members at any time.
Admins are also responsible for creating Projects within Groups.
A Project for a research group is usually a research paper, but Projects can also be other forms of documents that could benefit from discussion and revisions. Examples include study guides, business plans, articles, and essays. Each Group can have an unlimited number of Projects within it, and all Projects within a Group are shared among the same members.
Once a user builds a network, they can create new Groups that consist of their network members. By default, the creator of a group is the admin. The most common Group is a research group, but the platform can manage several other types of academic projects.
Platform users can create study groups for sharing course materials or groups of club members for extracurricular work.The admin of the Group has the ability to add new members at any time. Admins are also responsible for creating Projects within Groups.
A Project for a research group is usually a research paper, but Projects can also be other forms of documents that could benefit from discussion and revisions. Examples include study guides, business plans, articles, and essays. Each Group can have an unlimited number of Projects within it, and all Projects within a Group are shared among the same members.
When a new Project is created, an initial revision must be shared. This can either be plain text or a PDF.
The Project will be immediately visible to all Group members with the first revision shown. Group members can comment on the revision with questions or feedback, and others can reply to comments.When another revision of the paper has been completed, the Group admin can add a new revision to the same Project.
The revision will become visible above the prior revision, and it will have a new comment box associated with it. Projects make it simple to keep track of a paper’s entire revision history and discussions at each stage.
For each revision, Group admins can also create subtasks. Arrows allow Group members to view all of the different subtasks and comment on them individually. Subtasks allow a paper to be analyzed in unique components. For example, a research paper can have a unique subtask for each of its sections, and collaborators can discuss them all separately in the comment boxes. Jinso is a quicker way to collaborate on long-term projects. It makes it easier to connect, share, and manage the development of ideas and papers. You can create a Jinso account and start using the platform today for your research and academic needs at jinso.io.
The U.S. Constitutional Convention is a must-know topic for any United States History class, but what about state constitutional conventions? Relatively little information has been studied about their proceedings, but a decentralized group of researchers is working to change that.
In February of 2021, Conner Huey (then a high school senior) stumbled upon the work of Dr. Nicholas Cole at the University of Oxford. Cole directs the Quill Project, which seeks to model conventions and assemblies globally to understand our world’s legal foundations. Quill developed a platform for reconstructing conventions through records of negotiations, proposals and votes. Its technologies are used by several groups of researchers around the world reconstructing conventions in their respective regions.
When Huey first contacted Cole, the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University—an open enrollment school of about 40,000 students—had recently completed a model of the Utah State Constitution (1895) in collaboration with the Quill Project. The center’s work earned it a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct its work to three other western U.S. states, including Washington, Conner’s home state. Cole was quickly able to onboard Huey with the Washington team.
The project is a great example of how decentralized research initiatives can enhance access to research and scale a project efficiently. The research is decentralized because it compiles contributions from research groups around the world. Undergraduate researchers at Utah Valley University and other politically-minded scholars in Western states like Huey can apply the Quill Project’s research aims and approaches to their local area. They benefit from support and resources from the project established at Oxford, and conducting the Western States Project is only possible because of their local understanding and physical location.
Huey travels around Washington to gather primary sources about the state’s constitutional convention. “I [made] trips back and forth to the University of Washington Special Collections Library to make sure we have the information [needed],” he shared. His day-to-day work consists mostly of reading primary source data to determine the necessary inputs to the model so that it can reconstruct the convention.
Huey has closely collaborated with the team at Utah Valley University, recalling “[they] helped onboard me into the whole process.” The Utah-based researchers are currently finishing their model of Idaho’s convention.
The Western States Project is only one component of the Quill Project. Quill is modeling the writing conventions of documents in Europe like The Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), and it has launched exploratory projects in Australian and Indian constitutional law and development.
Huey is continuing his studies of political history and electoral politics at Harvard University where he intends to pursue a joint concentration in Government and History. “I want to build my skill set to take on this project and pursue studying electoral modern day politics though a PhD,” he added.