WORKING WITH QUILL

How Quill Developed My Understanding of the Northern Ireland Peace Process: Julia Duddy shares some of her experiences of working with Quill on the Writing Peace Project in summer 2021.

The model at the heart of this project is constructed by taking official accounts and papers produced during the Peace Process and using them to create a ‘spine’ in the software platform around which the digital edition is constructed. Unofficial sources, private papers and correspondence, and later recollections are presented as a secondary layer of material around this core. It is hoped that links to relevant public briefings, oral history and media archives will also be added over time. This layering enables us to build multiple perspectives into the model even at an early stage when we are working primarily from a single archive, but it is also sufficiently flexible to allow us to expand the model as we (hopefully) gain access to new sources and additional archives through collaborations with other institutions and individuals.

Development of Text Over Time

One of the most significant contributions of the completed model will be to bring together in one place attempts at agreement over the space of a century. Quill’s unique visualizations and search functions will allow users to track the development of text and the origins of particular phrases, in an approach similar to the ‘track changes’ features we are familiar with in word processing programs.

Multiple Perspectives

Modelling the negotiations meeting-by-meeting highlights how text is constructed and shows multiple perspectives on the same event as the following screenshot illustrates:

Analysis of Contributions by Delegation or Individual

Using the data entered into the detailed model, the platform also generates a range of other visualizations to allow researchers to explore connections between documents, or to enable users to study the contributions of particular individuals or delegations.