Crate · The Graph

The Graph

Every article the corpus holds, and every claim it makes between them, with geography taken away. In a plane the lines have to cross each other; in space they do not. Turn it and two things the flat drawing hides come back — how far apart the arguments actually sit, and the cluster that connects to nothing else.

Two named arguments run through this field
How to read a line
Thickness is salience — how much the claim explains, next to the alternatives. It is measured in screen pixels and does not shrink with distance, so a thick line at the back is still a thick line.
Opacity is how true it is. These are two different claims and the corpus never collapses them into one number.
Colour is the kind of claim. A steel line runs scene to scene. A violet line is an influence reaching a scene it touched — the colour its own square is drawn in. Colour says which kind, never how strong or how true: those are the thickness and the opacity.
Depth is focus, not fade. A line further away goes soft at the edge and loses a little colour to the ground. It keeps its width and its opacity, because both of those already mean something else.
Dotted and faint is a negative touch: something the corpus says did not reach a scene. It is an absence, not a connection.
Long-dashed means a number is missing rather than low — nobody has scored that link.
Short-dashed is an influence sitting inside its home scene rather than reaching out to one. It carries no salience or truth because it is not that kind of claim.
Round is a scene, square is an influence, hollow is a stub that has been seeded and not yet written. A point's size is how many claims touch it.
Not yet connected
Points are sized by how many claims touch them, not by how many records a scene holds — this is a picture of the argument, not of the collection. Positions are computed once when the site is built and are the same for everybody: the same corpus always draws the same graph, from the same angle, every time. Every line here is a sentence somebody wrote — select one to read it. Prefer a list? The Contents page holds the same corpus as plain text.