About the Platform

Linnaeus.world is a publishing platform and archive for scholars and anyone with abundant curiosity. The goal is a simple and beautiful repository for collections of documents that deserve preservation and exhibition. The typical collection may be canonical documents such as Constitutions (where we started – more on that below), but Linnaeus.world will include less solemn genres as well. Really, any documents that are worth collecting, reading, and analyzing.

Our namesake is the Swedish biologist, Carl Linnaeus, who had a preternatural zeal for collecting and naming things. Like its namesake, Linnaeus.world is laser-focused on concepts. The left panel of the platform identifies the central concepts (ideas) that are embedded in a given collection of documents. We believe that being quite conscious of the vocabulary that represents ideas is the key to knowledge. After all, we use words to think and think with words; having the right word for an idea allows us to represent knowledge. Or, Confucius observed, “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.”

Linnaeus.world started with a fascination with historical constitutions from around the world. Part of our work has been the collection and analysis of almost every constitution written since 1789. In 2013, we partnered with Google’s Jigsaw to build an indexed repository of national constitutions. One of the purposes was to allow constitutional drafters to explore their options. That collection, Constitute, is now included in Linnaeus as well, although without some of the bells and whistles on the original site.

Linnaeus.world launched with three demonstration collections – national constitutions, charters of international organizations, and the academic freedom statements that universities have produced. We have some expertise in these genres, but we are committed to publishing collections on other topics by other editors as well (see below). You can read more about each of the collections – what’s in them, how they’re produced, etc. – right here. You’ll notice that Linneaus.world treats the collection of About Pages the way it treats other collections.

Collections are organized in three panels: (1) topics, (2) document lists, and (3) texts. Click on a topic in the first panel’s topic tree (or the search bar) and see excerpts related to the topic for each document in the second panel. Click on a document or its excerpt and in the second panel and view the excerpt in context in the the third panel. Or just explore – you’ll get it. Also, notice that each paragraph is linkable if you want to share particular locations of the document.

Except for material identified as copyrighted by other parties, the content of Linnaeus is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 3.0 Unported License (which allows you to make free use of information from the site for noncommercial purposes). Each collection should be cited appropriately. For example, the Academic Freedom collection is cited this way:

Linnaeus is a product of the Comparative Constitutions Project and Psycle Interactive. We thank the many graduate students who have worked with us since 2005, many of whom are listed here (current staff) and here (former staff).

Each collection on Linnaeus.world is edited by enthusiasts of that particular genre. These edited collections are published and cited in the same way a print collection would be.

We expect to publish new collections on a rolling basis. If you have expertise in, and enthusiasm for, a particular genre, we welcome your proposal. The call for proposals will be announced shortly in these pages. If you would like to be notified of the call, please contact info@linnaeus.world