Alchemical Hands in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Marginalia, Scholarship & Reception

Project Documents

This section makes the project legible as a research build rather than a black box. It gathers 15 internal methodological and reflective documents—ontology notes, concordance method, boundary audits, proposals, mistakes, aesthetic reviews, and related planning texts—that explain what the project thinks it is doing and where its assumptions have shifted over time.

These documents are part of the scholarly apparatus, not just engineering residue. They record how the database, site, and interpretive claims were assembled, where the strongest arguments lie, and where the project has had to revise itself.

DocumentDescriptionWords
Interface Design How data becomes pages: navigation, surfacing audit, page builders, design language. 732
Data Ontology All 22 tables: canonical entities, deprecated tables, relationships, coverage, and confidence. 697
Build Pipeline Every script in execution order, from PDF ingestion through site generation. 622
README Project overview for GitHub. 1,416
Execution Roadmap What is BUILT, READY, BLOCKED, and SPECULATIVE. No hypothetical features. 557
System Architecture Architecture, data flow, operating modes, and constraints for the HP platform. 386
Concordance Progress How the concordance problem-solving progressed and metrics. 1,439
Concordance Methodology How the 6-step folio-to-image concordance was built from Russell's thesis. 1,027
MIT Site Analysis Reverse-engineering of the MIT Electronic Hypnerotomachia (1997). 3,228
Multimodal RAG Study Vision model proposal for reading 674 manuscript images. 2,157
Image Identification What Claude saw reading 69 BL manuscript photographs. 1,405
System Critique Concordance system audit: 7 issues, 0 integrity errors. 1,226
Mistakes to Avoid Twelve hard-won lessons from this project. 1,627
Session Findings Build outward not deeper: session discoveries and philosophy. 983
Woodcut Research 18 woodcuts: subjects, attribution, scholarly context. 1,787