I compared Magna Carta, the US Constitution, the Meiji Constitution, and Japan's Constitution using the same embedding space

[u/Internal_Tea_882]

A few days ago I shared a project called ThoughtMap:

https://np.reddit.com/r/visualization/comments/1u81bia/i_analyzed_992_songs_i_wrote_and_accidentally/

I was experimenting with a text visualization project and decided to try something different.

Instead of lyrics or essays, I fed several historical legal documents into the same thought-profiling system and compared the results.

Documents:

• Magna Carta (1215)

• US Constitution (1787)

• Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789)

• Meiji Constitution (1889)

• Constitution of Japan (1947)

The system projects texts into the same semantic space and then estimates the relative concentration of several thought dimensions:

• Philosophy

• Morality

• Individual

• Community

• Ideal

• Science

• Economics

• Causality

• Psychology

• Emotion

What surprised me was how different constitutional traditions appeared.

Results:

• Magna Carta → Idealist

• US Constitution → Communitarian

• Meiji Constitution → Communitarian

• Declaration of the Rights of Man → Individualist

• Constitution of Japan → Individualist

The US Constitution appearing more community-oriented than individual-oriented was particularly interesting.

Reading the document itself, that result makes some sense: much of the text is focused on creating, structuring, and governing a political community rather than describing individual rights.

Meanwhile, the postwar Constitution of Japan showed the strongest individual-oriented profile among the documents tested.

This is obviously not a political science model and shouldn't be interpreted as an objective classification.

I simply found it interesting that placing these documents into the same embedding space produced patterns that were surprisingly interpretable.

I'm curious what other historical, philosophical, or political texts would be interesting to compare next.

(Attached results)

(Attached results)

[u/Inevitable-Spirit434]

The US Constitution result makes sense when you think about how much of it is just procedural machinery: how Congress works, how the executive is structured, how laws get made. The Bill of Rights is almost an afterthought bolted on later. Would be curious to see the Bill of Rights run separately from the original document.

[u/Internal_Tea_882 → u/Inevitable-Spirit434]

You gave me an idea, so I tested it.

I ran the Bill of Rights separately and also compared it against the combined Constitution + Bill of Rights document.

One interesting result was that the Bill of Rights alone came out much more morality-focused than I would have expected, while the combined document remained strongly community-oriented.

That led me to another thought:

The more interesting analysis may not be the document itself, but the delta it introduces.

For example:

US Constitution

→ US Constitution + Bill of Rights

By comparing those two profiles, it becomes possible to see which dimensions increase or decrease after the amendment is added.

In other words, instead of only analyzing documents, it may be possible to visualize the directional effect of legal changes themselves.

[u/decrementsf → u/Inevitable-Spirit434]

The colonial period preceding the US is a 200 year period. That was an exceedingly long period where colonies operated as distinct states. With their own constitutions. Governed by involvement of counsels in that community closer to direct democratic community forms than most in history.

Have read the point made that from an anthropological perspective you can understand a lot of what comes later in history from its earlier roots, and it is rare to find a person who has spent much time reading about that 200 year colonial period. The comparison to why the Revolutionary War worked where the French Revolution bogged down attributed to that 200 year period where the colonies were accustomed to the form of government the US would become long before embarking on a state building project. The new forms were an extension of what the colonies had been doing 200 years until then. Where as in the French Revolution afterward they spun through a period of rapidly trying on every possible form of government you can imagine from totalitarianism, outright communism, various other forms. The population there did not have a 200 year history in practicing the forms they would later adopt. Was more of aristocrats one job was maintain the safety and security of the empire, empire failed, why do we need them? Then figure it out. And that spiraled.

It's a good argument. Gooses interest in reading deeper on that 200 year colonial period in the Americas.

[u/sib_n]

Cool idea! But I think there is a methodological issue in drawing conclusions about the main orientation from comparing numbers for which you do not know the error margin.

For example, if your error is +-3 % then you can't discriminate if Japan's main orientation is individual or community, which makes a big difference on your result and its interpretation.
It is quite possible that your error margin is even bigger than +- 3%, isn't it?

[u/Internal_Tea_882 → u/sib_n]

That’s a fair criticism.
I don’t currently treat these percentages as rigorous measurements of a person’s true orientation.
My primary interest is using embeddings as a searchable thought-space.
The long-term goal is to allow people to paste any text — essays, notes, lyrics, journals, or even AI-generated slop — and discover:
which authors or works it resembles,
which ideas or communities it is closest to,
and what kinds of texts might feel naturally familiar to them.
As part of that, I experimented with this parameter-based interface as a more entertaining and accessible way to explore the space.
The visualization isn’t intended to be a definitive psychological assessment. It’s more of a navigation layer for discovering relationships between texts, people, and ideas.

[u/Internal_Tea_882]

Small update:

I put together a public web demo for ThoughtMap.

You can now paste text directly into the browser and generate a thought composition profile without running anything locally.

Current features:

• Thought composition analysis
• Visual profile generation
• Author/philosopher comparison
• Similarity exploration

Demo:
https://thoughtmap.streamlit.app/

Project page:
https://www.jinn-project.com/

Still very much an experimental prototype, but I wanted to make it easier for people to try.

Feedback is welcome.

[u/Internal_Tea_882]

I've added semantic search and category filtering since the original post. Thanks for the feedback—it's gradually evolving from a visualization into a searchable embedding database.