Comparing Texts of the Okmulgee Constitution: Fourteen Instrument Versions and Levenshtein’s Edit Distance Metric

Authors

Charles D. Bernholz, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

5-2011

Comments

Sabbatical report, released May 29, 2011.

341 pages.

Copyright 2011 Charles Bernholz.

Abstract

In 1870, the Five Civilized and other tribes within the Indian Territory initiated a series of council meetings to deal with seven federal stipulations presented at Fort Smith in 1865 and with new treaties established in 1866. One development was the so-called December 1870 Okmulgee Constitution, fashioned in the Creek capital, that provided a model for a new full-fledged Indian state to replace the Territory. Various versions of the text of that document (and of a revised rendition) were published, as part of the official and unofficial record of the sequence of proceedings. This study examined fourteen variants of that Okmulgee Constitution, in terms of the documents‘ provenance and of their variability as quantified through the application of Levenshtein‘s edit distance algorithm.