The GDELT Project

Google Constitute: Digitizing the World's Constitutions

The Google Constitute project has made headlines across the world in its efforts to digitize and make searchable the world's constitutions, to find ways technology can continue to support and improve constitution design, allowing drafters, academics and global citizens to find and compare the world's constitutions. Kalev was brought into the project seven years ago to completely reimagine the way it collected, codified, and managed the data it was collecting and creating.  He rearchitected all technical and data aspects of the entire project from scratch, building the enormous array of infrastructure systems and methodologies that ultimately supported the transfer of the analog print world of constitutions to the digital world of Google Constitute. Over a little more than half a decade he established the mass acquisition and digitization workflows, data management processes, and built the entire infrastructure from realtime network diagrams and readouts on coding progress and communications, to novel indicators and evaluation metrics, to the coding system itself, all of which still power the project today.  In 2012 he coauthored an article with the team on the Interpretability of Law: Lessons from the Decoding of National Constitutions.