The Quill Project is a new, digital, platform designed to transform the study and teaching of the history of the 1787 Constitutional Convention and subsequent, negotiated, legal texts. It transforms access to the founding documents of American constitutional law, by making available to a wider audience newly accurate and useful versions of the records of the Constitution’s creation. It promotes a new approach to the study of foundational, negotiated, legal texts and establish a software platform, Quill, that will have a significance for the study of a wide range of records. The platform has been written to cope with all of the problems presented by the specific manuscript material relating to 1787, but has much wider applications, and is a generalized tool for the study of all formally negotiated documents of this character. It has been designed from the start to encourage work-flows that allow for inter-institutional co-operation, and to be a hub that can not only host its own material and commentary, but link to resources available elsewhere.
