The SOTD Research Network aims to understand democracy through the recognition that (a) democracy has always meant multiple things, (b) that "democracy" is but one sign from many available signs (e.g. manapori (in Maori), ប្រជាធិបតេយ្យ (brachathibtey in Khmer) or the closely linked ประชาธิปไตย (prachāṭhiptịy in Thai), nền dân chủ (in Vietnamese), kabimamenkabi (in Twi), ప్రజాస్వామ్యం (prajāsvāmyaṁ in Telugu), etc), and (c) that information on these different terms can come to us from across time, space, language, culture, and species (the "ethno-quantic domain").

Our objectives, from this aim, include:

- The description of different species of democracy/manapori/minshu shugi (in Japanese) or the closely linked minjujuui (in Korean)/etc

- The gathering and organization of information about different species of democracy/Volksherrschaft (a cognate term for 'democracy' in German)/ludowładztwo (cognate term for 'democracy' in Polish)/min zhu (in Mandarin Chinese)/etc

- The understanding of how specific species of democracy/etc evolve over time or how many/all of them have evolved over time

- The testing, empirically or otherwise, of different species of democracy/etc under different situations, especially to gain understanding about their ability to "democratize" a space, a process, a people, a mentality, and so forth

- Developing theories around how to understand (or if we can ever understand) all democracies/etc together (a digital humanities, big data, and AI undertaking)

- The analysis of a corpus, or corpuses, of democracy/etc to, for example, identify gaps or imbalances (especially around gender of authors and regions of scholarship)

- And the democratization of the study of democracy/etc so that good relations and mutual learning/support can continue to occur between, for example, practitioners and scholars.