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)

1. Introduction — context and an explicit thesis the essay will argue.
2. Thematic argument sections — one per major claim, each developing claim -> evidence -> interpretation; the sections build the argument cumulatively.
3. Conclusion — what the argument establishes and why it matters; no new evidence introduced here.
4. 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

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.