Negotiated Texts

About
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This network was funded from December 2016 to December 2018.

Some of the most critical and foundational documents of the modern world have been created not by individuals but by a formal process of negotiation, usually involving a quasi-Parliamentary procedure of committees and sub-committees, often over extended periods of time. Examples include constitutions, treaties or ordinary legislation, together with documents such as the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights, or the foundational treaties of the European Union. The records of these negotiations can be extremely challenging to read as amendment after amendment adjusts the document under discussion in ways that were obvious to participants but which are difficult for readers to visualize, and negotiations stretch over months or years.

In October 2016 the www.quillproject.net platform was launched. This platform has been built to show both the chronology of events and the hierarchy of decision-making within a process of formal negotiation, while allowing users to view a reconstruction of the state of documents available to a committee during any moment of its deliberations.

This network emphasized collaboration between projects and the integration of datasets across platforms for a seamless user experience. The launch conference for the Quill Platform showcased co-operation with educational non-profit organizations designing materials for classroom use, as well as a number of other digital research projects working on similar material but taking different approaches.

This network was building on the topics identified during the quillproject.net conference discussion, and refine and develop understanding of the problems posed by this material for researchers; promote an understanding of the existing tools for their exploration; investigate new ways to extend and integrate those tools; and explore new ways to present this category of material to a non-expert audience.

This network brought together researchers working on the records of formal negotiations, especially those using digital and statistical methodologies for research, or those seeking to use digital platforms for teaching and public engagement.

Contact:

Dr Nicholas Cole

Dr Alfie Abdul-Rahman

People

Convenors:

Dr Nicholas Cole

Dr Alfie Abdul-Rahman

Alex Butterworth

David de Roure

Events
Past Events

Negotiated Texts

negotiated texts network logo

 

Negotiated Texts Launch (March 2017)
Launch of network event 
 
Negotiated Texts and Digital Humanities Seminar (May 2017) 
Speakers: 
Dr Meghan Campbell, Deputy-Director of the Oxford Human Rights Hub, presented on the gaps revealed by the drafting process of CEDAW 
Dr Martin Poulter, Wikimedian In Residence for the University of Oxford, presented on wiki-based platforms and the potential for collaboration with open data sets. 
 
Negotiated Text Network Seminar (June 2017) 
Speakers: 
Dr Louise Thompson, Lecturer in British Politics, University of Surrey, "The challenges of utilising UK parliamentary texts in research" 
Dr Luke Blaxill, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, Anglia Ruskin University, "A War of Words? Text Mining Political Speeches in Britain in the 19th and 20th Centuries" 
 
Making Sense of Negotiated Text at Scale: a workshop (November 2017) 
Workshop: 
  • Alfie Abdul-Rahman, Research Associate, University of Oxford e-Research Centre  
  • Nicholas Cole Senior Research Fellow, Pembroke College Oxford 
  • Abhishek Dasgupta doctoral student, Exeter College 
  • David Doyle, Associate Professor of Latin American Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford a Fellow of St Hugh’s College 
  • Félix Krawatzek, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations and a Research Fellow at Nuffield College. 
  • David Price co-founded DebateGraph with the former Australian cabinet minister Peter Baldwin 
  • Radoslaw Zubek, Associate Professor of European Politics, a Tutorial Fellow at Hertford College 
 
Article 32 VCLT and Some Problems of Treaty Interpretation (February 2018)  
Negotiated Texts Seminar 
Moderator: Matthew Windsor - Junior Research Fellow in Law, Hertford College  
Panelists: 
Talita de Souza Dias - DPhil Candidate, Balliol College 
Yulia Ioffe - DPhil Candidate, St Cross College 
 
Using Digital Tools to Understand Policy Making (June 2018) 
Negotiated Texts Workshop 
Workshop 
Introductions 
Dr Nicholas Cole (University of Oxford); Dr Alfie Abdul-Rahman (KCL) 
Challenges presented by negotiated texts 
Chair: Nicholas Cole 
Speakers: Jan Lemnitzer (University of Southern Denmark); Udit Bhatia (University of Oxford); Elise Luhr Dietrichson (SOAS) 
Digital solutions to working with negotiated texts 
Chair: Alfie Abdul-Rahman 
Speakers: Omer Gunes (University of Oxford); Cagatay Turkay (City University, London); Rita Bongo (KCL) 
 
Presenting the Records of Historical Decision-Making (February 2019) 
A Quill Project workshop  
Programme 
Session I: Rethinking Digital Editions 
Sarah Martin (Adams Papers Editorial Project) 
Michael Pidd (University of Sheffield) 
Alexander von Lünen (University of Huddersfield) 
Session II: Approaches to Large Corpora of Data 
Ida Nijenhuis (Hugens ING) 
Kathleen Richman (LLMC) 
Session III: Creating Materials for Classroom Use 
Julie Silverbrook (ConSource) 
Stan Swim (Bill of Rights Institute) 
Nicholas Cole (University of Oxford) 
  
Two meetings were held to discuss Oxford’s infrastructure for Digital Humanities scholars. 
Current challenges facing DH scholars at Oxford (May 2019) 
The first meeting focused on articulating common challenges and sharing current best practices in areas such as: 
  • data encoding and preservation 
  • search tools and data discovery (both curated and automated) 
  • contextualizing displayed text with a larger collection 
  • meeting the needs of researchers in a funding climate which emphasizes the impact agenda  
Creating 21st Century Infrastructure for Digital Humanities Scholars at Oxford (June 2019) 
The second meeting considered potential solutions with a view to a joint bid for innovation funding. 
 
 
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