Visualisation

Designing Quill’s Visual Elements

The Quill Project has had to solve a number of difficult visualization tasks.  Existing ‘track changes’ interfaces are not designed to allow easy navigation of historical data, while the interfaces to source-code archives are optimized for the tasks facing computer scientists.

In any kind of formal negotiation, events such as the tabling of a particular proposal, or assent to a particular proposal have both a temporal sequence and a hierarchical relationship.  An amendment relates to a particular document, but might also be an amendment of another amendment, or even an amendment of an amendment of an amendment.  ‘Timelines’ showing the sequence of events are familiar in many settings, and tree structures showing hierarchical relationships are also extremely common design elements, but finding a way to combine both pieces of information was more of a challenge.

We ultimately took inspiration from traditional musical notation (which, in its own way represents a combination of sequence and hierarchy) and built the most distinctive visual elements of the Quill project around that concept.

More generally, we have adopted a modern, abstract approach throughout the website, in an effort — as far as possible — to emphasize the process of debate at the 1787 Convention or in other settings as an intelligible, rational process of debate, rather than something alien and of antiquarian interest.