Computational-ontology model for mapping competing realities in constitutional texts, built on Maurizio Ferraris's New Realism (ontology ≠ epistemology; documentality: Object = Inscribed Act). Part of the Computational Ontology ecosystem alongside soce, constitutionsplus and herder-companion.
The analyzer takes a text and returns a structured breakdown in three strata:
| Stratum | Ferraris / Peirce | What it produces |
|---|---|---|
| E1 · Record | firstness · ontology | the frozen inscription; inscribed acts; entities typed physical / ideal / social; document type |
| E2 · Enunciation | secondness · epistemology | claims and frames; the operator on each claim (↓ naturalised · ✦ revealed · other); ideological signature |
| E3 · Mediation | thirdness · technology | the card, a JSON-LD export against the project ontology, and a reflexive log (model version, date) |
Every model output is labelled emendable and carries a model hash and a date; the frozen input is the only in-emendable item and is never rewritten.
Sprint 0 (Sept–Oct 2026): repository skeleton, codebook v1.0 (emergency provisions, exploratory) and v2.0 (preambles), frozen corpus snapshots. See docs/plan.md for the full plan, timeline and preregistration skeleton, and docs/project-instructions.md for the axioms, the three tables and the canonical vocabulary.
Pilot corpus: emergency provisions (Constitute topic key em) across in-force constitutions, English first, Spanish originals second.
codebook/ annotation manual (CC BY 4.0) — the document that gets frozen and DOI'd first
ontology/ OWL / SKOS vocabulary used by the JSON-LD export (CC BY 4.0)
data/ NOT the texts (see data/README.md) — snapshot manifest, hashes, annotations keyed to constitution id + section id
docs/ plan, project instructions, datasheet and model cards
notebooks/ Kaggle / Colab notebooks (bake-off, fine-tuning), exported here after each run
src/nra/ pipeline code (fetch, freeze, E1–E3, evaluation)
tests/
- Code (
src/,tests/,notebooks/): Apache License 2.0 —LICENSE - Codebook, ontology and documentation (
codebook/,ontology/,docs/): CC BY 4.0 —LICENSE-DOCS - Constitutional texts are not distributed here. See
NOTICE.
GitHub releases are archived on Zenodo under one concept DOI (CITATION.cff carries the metadata); the annotation study is preregistered on OSF before annotation starts; models and dataset cards go to the Hugging Face Hub with a Zenodo mirror. Enforced order: freeze codebook → Zenodo DOI → seal OSF → run.
See CITATION.cff. Constitute texts must be cited as: Elkins, Zachary, Tom Ginsburg, James Melton. Constitute: The World's Constitutions to Read, Search, and Compare. constituteproject.org.