| name | humanities-chicago |
| description | Write an argumentative humanities essay in Chicago Notes-Bibliography style — Introduction with thesis, thematic argument sections (claim, evidence, interpretation), Conclusion, numbered footnotes/endnotes, and a full Bibliography. Use when the deliverable is a humanities argument advanced through close reading, not an empirical study. Anti-trigger; for the same notes-bibliography convention with parenthetical author-date citations instead of footnotes use humanities-mla, for an empirical IMRaD paper with Method and Results use academic. |
| argument-hint | <the humanities thesis or argument to write> |
humanities-chicago
Produces an argumentative humanities essay in Chicago Notes-Bibliography
style: a scholarly argument advanced through close reading and
interpretation, not an empirical study. Its center of gravity is the
citation apparatus — every claim carries a numbered footnote (or endnote)
with its human-readable source citation, and the back matter carries a full,
alphabetized Bibliography. This genre follows the Chicago Manual of
Style's Notes-Bibliography system, the standard citation convention for
history, literature, and the arts.
Scope caveat (weakened verdict — carry, do not over-attribute): Chicago
Notes-Bibliography is a presentation/citation convention, validated less
firmly than the STEM standards. The genre reproduces the argumentative
structure and citation form; do not over-attribute conformance.
Pattern (industry: Chicago Manual of Style, Notes-Bibliography system)
- Introduction — context and an explicit thesis the essay will argue.
- Thematic argument sections — one per major claim, each developing
claim -> evidence -> interpretation; the sections build the argument
cumulatively.
- Conclusion — what the argument establishes and why it matters; no new
evidence introduced here.
- Bibliography — the full, alphabetized list of every source cited,
Chicago style.
There is no Method and no Results section — the essay argues; it does not
report an experiment. This is the distinguishing feature versus the
academic genre.
Citation Style
Chicago Notes-Bibliography: numbered footnotes (or endnotes) carry the
citations — e.g. [^1] markers resolving to a note with the human-readable
source citation (author, title, publication detail, URL where applicable) —
and a full Bibliography lists every source alphabetically by author
surname. Internally each note may resolve through a MIF finding @id for
traceability (MIF Level 3 floor), but that @id is never printed in the note
or the body text. No uncited claims — an orphan fact is a defect.
Verify the current Chicago Manual of Style edition live (the 18th Edition
supersedes the 17th); do not bake an edition number into output as settled
fact.
Required Figures & Matter
- Front matter: title and, where the convention calls for it, author and
date.
- Figures: tables or images only where the argument genuinely needs them;
caption and reference each. Any figure, chart, or diagram is rendered as a
fenced Mermaid code block (a
mermaid info-string fence), never ASCII art,
an image link, or Graphviz/DOT; a required figure is never silently
omitted — if the data cannot support it, say so in prose. Plain tabular
matter stays a Markdown table.
- Back matter: the full Bibliography (required) — alphabetized,
Chicago style.
Rules that keep it a Chicago humanities essay
- Every claim carries a numbered footnote with its human-readable source
citation; that footnote may resolve internally to a MIF finding
@id for
traceability (never printed). No orphan facts.
- The Bibliography is mandatory back matter and must be alphabetized — an
essay with footnotes but no Bibliography, or a Bibliography with no
footnotes tying claims to it, is not conformant.
- State the limits of the reading honestly; engage counter-interpretations.
An unaddressed strong counter-reading is a defect.
- Report verification verdicts; do not silently drop
weakened or
inconclusive findings — annotate them with an explicit uncertainty
qualifier. Exclude only falsified units.
- Hedge uncertain interpretations; do not over-attribute when sources are
contested.
- Exhaustive coverage: build the essay from the full surviving findings
corpus — every surviving finding is treated with its own evidence (claim,
citations, entities), never condensed to a cherry-picked subset. A silently
dropped finding is a defect.
- No
urn:mif: identifiers or internal finding-ID handles leak into prose or
footnotes.
Anti-triggers — do not use this genre for
- The same notes-bibliography argument with author-date parenthetical
citations instead of footnotes — that is
humanities-mla: same
argumentative shape, a different citation apparatus (in-text (Author page) plus a Works Cited list, not footnotes plus a Bibliography).
- An empirical study with Method and Results — that is
academic:
IMRaD structure, mandatory citation discipline, but reporting a study
rather than arguing a reading.
- A practitioner decision built around a mandatory comparison table —
that is
engineering.
MIF frontmatter
type: semantic — a humanities essay is declarative argument-and-evidence
knowledge, not a time-bound event or a step sequence. Climb to L2 with
namespace (humanities-chicago/<area>), modified, title, and tags
when the drafting context supplies them. Gate every output with
mif-validate at its target level; the floor is --level 1.
Why machine-readable — the point of MIF here
| Question an agent asks | Answered by (frontmatter) |
|---|
| Is this reading still current, or has scholarship moved on? | temporal.validFrom / ttl |
| Where did the evidence come from; can I trust it? | provenance (W3C-PROV) + citations[] |
| What does this essay build on or get contested by? | typed relationships[] (relates-to, contested-by) |
| Which footnote traces to which source? | citations[] tied to each argument claim |
The same document still reads as a human humanities essay and projects
losslessly to JSON-LD and back — one artifact, two readers.
The L1 -> L3 climb (two exemplars)
This genre ships the same essay at two MIF levels so the climb is
explicit:
templates/good-l1.md — L1 floor: id, type, created + body. A
complete, valid essay, but opaque to a machine consumer.
templates/good.md — L3 (highest this genre supports): adds
namespace, modified, temporal validity, W3C-PROV provenance,
citations[] tied to the footnoted claims, and a typed relationships[]
graph (e.g. relates-to a companion essay in a neighboring genre).
Validate with mif-validate --level 3.
Author at the highest level the drafting context supports (grade down
rather than fabricate). templates/bad.md shows the antipattern: an essay
that asserts claims with no footnotes and no Bibliography — the citation
apparatus this genre exists to require is simply missing.