He Said, She Said!

Introduction

As the eldest delegate at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin had no easy task in steering the heated debate about the institutional foundations of the United States. At the end of a gruelling process that would span over four months he was approached by a prominent Philadelphian society lady who asked, ‘Well, Doctor, what have we got – a Republic or a Monarchy?’ To which he retorted, ‘A Republic, if you can keep it’. Franklin’s response is a cautionary tale about the sharp divisions and conflicts in formal negotiations in high-stakes scenarios.

From climate change to trade talks to nuclear disarmament, formal negotiations are part and parcel of international affairs. The treaties and agreements that come out of such talks govern many aspects of our lives. Yet the layers of complexity behind decision-making processes are not always immediately apparent in the final treaty document which is proudly presented at the concluding all-smiles press conference.

A better sense of the dynamics behind the scenes would often help us to understand why big historical events turned out the way they did. In many instances, records of formal negotiations do exist, of course. But they’re often difficult to follow and don’t always provide much detail about the sequences in which decisions were taken, or the hierarchies between decision-makers. Sometimes important details about proposals that would be voted down later in the process are missing.

Using the US Constitution as a case study, Dr Alfie Abdul-Rahman from King's Informatics and her collaborators from Oxford University have built a model that pierces through the complexities of historical texts. And they’re now building on this approach to visualise the origins and evolution of complex conversations on social media in entirely new ways. Making it easier to disentangle who said what, where and when will make it much more straightforward to hold actors accountable for what they communicate on various platforms.

Background: Quilling the threads of history

Over the past couple of years, Dr Abdul-Rahman and her collaborator Dr Nicholas Cole from the University of Oxford have built and fine-tuned Quill, a publicly available service that helps domain experts to transform records of formal negotiations into a model that visualises decision-making processes. The platform unpacks negotiations such as legislative and parliamentary processes. This makes Quill a valuable resource not just for legal experts but also for researchers and students in history.

Figure 2: Quill calendar view of the US Constitutional Convention. Source: Quill Project

In principle, the drilling process cries out for automation: drill down the length of a standard pipe, secure the well, screw another pipe to the top and drill down further. Previous attempts at automation involved writing static scripts that would tell the system what to do. But the engineers quickly realised that it wouldn’t work. ‘The joke at the time was that it took more people on the rig to drill automatically than it took to drill manually, because you had all the drilling crew and then you also had to have the software engineers to repair the software every time it failed’, Professor Long recalls. While the drilling process seems repetitive from a safe distance, in practice it’s always very different.

The platform enables researchers to dig deep and uncover the details of varied processes at the end of which a negotiated text emerges. This 360° view makes for a much more rounded and complete picture of the most significant historical events. Quill makes it possible to follow multiple actors across multiple events to see how they interact – a level of detailed understanding that is not accessible by just sifting through an archive of records.