It may come as a surprise, but on average five countries write new constitutions every year. The people who write these documents are often outgunned and under-resourced as they try to search and analyze constitutions from the past.
Enter Constitute, a new product developed by UT Austin, U Chicago, and University College London. Constitute leverages a rich set of original data about the content of constitutions together with a complete set of constitutional texts. Users can search and extract constitutional passages using a powerful search engine and then compare and analyze them. All in a simple and beautiful typesetting environment.
Our presentation will introduce Constitute, its features and potential uses, and how it's changing constitution-writing in countries like Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen.
We anticipate an active discussion among activists and techies about how best to share and apply the linked open data that is at the core of Constitute.