2026-01-14
On Separating Fact From Fiction
Why every record in this archive is printed in three sections, and why the middle one is the only one we made up.
The Archive
An archive that mixes what it knows with what it imagines is not an archive. It is a mood. ENTITY is built on the assumption that the two can share a page provided they never share a column, and that the boundary between them has to be structural rather than tonal, enforced by the file format rather than by the reader's good sense.
Three sections, one record
Every Entity record carries a Provenance block, a Classification block and a Living Record. Provenance is historical and answerable: artist, date, medium, collection, holding institution, rights position, and a link to the source. Anything in that block can be checked by somebody who does not trust us, which is the only useful test of a provenance claim.
Classification is ours. Realm, Form, Phenomenon, Anatomy, Aura, Signal and Material Affinity are an original interpretive vocabulary applied to a historical object. They are printed under a heading that says so. No Classification value has ever been asserted as a finding about the world, and the interface does not let one be mistaken for one: the two blocks are set in different type, on different grounds, with different labels.
The unverified are shown, not hidden
Every record in this archive currently reads verified: false. That is not a placeholder we forgot to update. It means no human has yet opened the source link, confirmed the item, and confirmed that the digital reproduction, not merely the underlying work, is free of restriction. A public-domain painting photographed by an institution that licenses its photographs is not a public-domain photograph, and that distinction has ended other projects.
A no-known-restrictions statement is a finding, not a licence.
The build refuses to emit mint metadata while a record is unverified, and the production checklist blocks a drop on the same condition. Until then the records are readable, searchable and honest about their own status, which is a better state for an archive than a confident one.
What changes and what does not
The Living Record is the third block, and it is the only one that moves. Status, contact level, witnesses, House placement: all of it is read from the chain at page load and none of it is stored in the file except as a genesis value. When a chain read fails the page prints an em dash. It does not print the genesis value, and it does not print an estimate. An archive that fills gaps with plausible material has stopped being able to tell you which parts it knows.
