Group Update 10/03

[jmesdp]

At this group meeting we discussed big picture, recurrent themes within the US constitution and sub themes within those to create a dictionary that we can apply when marking up the constitution and each of our respective texts by enlightenment thinkers. With these terms defined and in hand, we then created an XML schema that we will use to mark up different parts of the constitution that we divided amongst ourselves. The terms, as we defined them, are as follows:

collective_sovereignty #people, as the collective entity are the sole source of power in a society.

seperation_of_powers #principle that divides the governement into three branches. executive. judicial. legislative

eligibility #explicit requirement/qualified to participate in political processes. gender. race. age. nationality. residency_status

limits_of_power #checks and parameters that limit the extent of the government's power. fixed_terms (of presidents). veto. impeachment. supreme_court_election.

consent_of_governed #mentions of general public explicitly sanctioning government's reach. elections. right_to_petition. amendment_process. representative_government

power_of_president #the degree of control that the president (or King) has over their people. commander_in_chief (of military). executive_orders. veto_power. appointment_power. pardon_power.

natural_rights #the rights everyone in a society is automatically granted/implicitly has. life. liberty. pursuit_of_happiness. property. equality. self_governance. freedom_of_speech. bare_arms.

justice #mentions of how crimes will be abjudicated. due_process. trial_by_jury. habeas_corpus. speedy_trial. cruel_and_unusual_punishment. double_jeopardy. self_incrimination. legal_representation. warrants.

taxes #types of tax, right of government to tax, consent to tax.

citizenship #how citizenship is granted or revoked. procedure.

[Ryan-Pavone]

Going along with what James said, we met up after we had all read through the constitution individually and about the first 15 pages of our individually assigned philosophers and we all had themes in mind that we wanted to address within the constitution. We discussed what we thought were the big philosophical themes of the constitution we wanted to discuss and subdivided those themes into different attributes. The themes and subthemes we decided are important and want to markup are all listed in James' comment. James did the type up of the XML schema that we decided would be good for our markup. At the end of our project meeting, we broke up the constitution into sections and assigned each person a section to markup according to our schema. Anna: preamble + article 1-4 James: article 5-7 Zellie: amendment 7-20 Ryan: amendment 21-27 We also set a goal to each have our own individual philosopher reading totally marked up, according to themes of our schema, by two meetings from this one.

[pickettj]

This is a very exciting project. I am sorry that my schedule has not allowed me to swing by one of your meetings, but wanted to offer some thoughts based on these write-ups a conversation with Cole:

As I understand it, this project aims to assess the impact of different philosophers on the US Constitution. In principle, this seems like an excellent use case of XML and related methodologies. My first question is: how will you decide which terms indicate one Enlightenment thinker rather than another? I am no expert on Enlightenment thought, but weren't many of these individuals constantly in dialogue with one another? There may be no perfect answer to this question, but it is the sort of question you will have to address for your readers on the website.

One strategy might be to identify groups of opposed intellectual "camps." If there were groups of philosophers that disagreed with one another on specific questions, then it will be more straightforward to mark up which direction the Constitution ultimately went.

How to translate broad intellectual "camps" (or differentiate between individual thinkers) into Markup? One way might be to rely on secondary literature: we decided that "liberty" (for instance) stands influence of this thinker / group, but not that one based on the scholarship of Professor Professorson.

Another strategy (and one even more on point for this course) might be to attempt some kind of topic modeling on a set of Enlightenment philosophical texts. Topic modeling is not something we teach as a unit in this course, but you are reading about it for homework this week. Basically, you can feed in raw texts, and the computer will output clusters of topics it identifies as especially important within the given texts. This is a method unrelated to XML, but it could reveal key words that you could then use to mark up the Constitution. Most importantly, it would give you an "objective" criteria to justify marking up terms or sections of the Constitution as indicative of one kind of influence or another.

Food for thought! Keep up the good work. And I am happy to find a time when we all might sit down and discuss.

[pickettj]

Also, some housekeeping:

• As your project gets larger, you will want to make sure to keep it organized: http://dh.obdurodon.org/project-structure.xhtml
• You should have some basic ReadMe information to help understand your site. It does not need to be as expansive as the "About" or "Methodology" section of your public-facing site. Here is an example from another project site: https://github.com/scanney/Grimm-Fairytales

[zelliewinterich]

Okay so I'm late but from what I remember-

We discussed what we wanted to do next. We decided to separately work on our own texts in XML markup and also work on collaborating on the constitution document!