Details Give Lessons from the Constitution | Dr. Nicholas Cole | BRI’s Constitutional Conversations

0:01 thank you excellent so what lessons do you think that teacher students citizens maybe those policymakers creating constitutions today or in the near future you know what can we learn through using the quill project I hope I

0:22 hope people will get excited by the idea of exploring really the the level of detail that went into the creation of America’s Constitution in our model you know just in terms of number of decisions made there’s this there’s well over a thousand opportunities that the

0:43 convention had to approve or reject particular forms of language there are you know almost equal number of amendments to texts that are proposed in different ways really are working through the detail of these documents if you think that the the American Constitution is about four and a half

1:04 thousand words long and in order to model that process of negotiation digitally it takes us about two-and-a-half thousand events in our timeline to model all of this that really gives you a sense of just the level of detail but I but I hope we’ve presented it in a way that is informing rather than overwhelming and what we’ve

1:25 what we’ve really found that excites us very much is that students of all ages are able to use the tools that we’ve put together to see how particular language evolves and you know rather than having to spend months in college trying to get to grips with difficult records we really can put the questions that

1:46 they’re interested in on the screen and show the context in which that kind of language emerges and what were the debates going on when that language emerges I mean even something as simple as showing you know if there’s a controversial speech that they’re reading well did that speech carry the

2:07 day you know did they did the vote that follows that speech actually adopt the the position of the speaker that they’re quoting because sometimes when you need narrative accounts of the convention of course that the narrators tend to pick out

2:32 blue said burn often those features don’t seem to have carried the mood of the room so we can we can really help students work through how the process of debate unfolded and and and get a sense of well how did the back-and-forth work and I think for some of the more advanced students one of the the points

2:54 that I hope they’ll start to understand is that it’s not the case that you know a point was raised it was debated you know the wisdom of a particular decision was decided and then the convention we’ve done often you know half a dozen arguments are in play at any one time

3:15 about why something might or might not be a good good idea and you can’t quite tell when the final vote happens exactly which of those arguments wins the day because that’s not really how humans tend to debate each other in these settings you take you tend to get people

3:37 throwing a lot of arguments into the ring and then taking a vote and it’s not as neat and tidy sometimes as as we might wish and I think it can be quite exciting to try and put yourself back in the in the mindset of people sitting in the room and of course the in in many

3:59 instances although Madison records quite a lot of detail about the points made in particular speeches he’s he’s condensing speeches that lasted sometimes for hours to maybe a couple of pages of notes and and again one of the things that our model can do is help to help students to

4:22 in a way escape from the idea that Madison has given you sort of the baton account of things and to look much more at the sort of process within which the the snippets of information that Madison gives us really sit so we found when we’ve worked with students of all ages that they’ve found things to really get

4:45 excited about through through being empowered really to explore the records for themselves