The Lattice · Dataset & Methodology
What is real, what is woven, and how time becomes latitude.
The Lattice holds 1,646 records of contact: 29 anchored historical handshakes, 3 self handshakes, 1,600 procedurally woven handshakes, and 14 near-misses that never happened. Every record has a year, two parties, one of eight domains, and a weight. The weave is deterministic — the same lattice grows from the same seed on every visit.
01The record
A handshake is the smallest unit The Lattice recognizes. Each record carries:
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| parties | the two hands — named people, roles, or machines |
| year | −2000 to 2200 (negative = BCE; 2026 = now) |
| domain | one of eight kinds of contact |
| weight | 0–1 relative gravity of the event |
| frames | optional readings: transactional, relational, narrative, systemic, emotional |
| note | one observed sentence |
02Four sources
| Source | Count | Nature |
|---|---|---|
| Anchors | 29 | hand-authored, named events from the historical record |
| Self | 3 | the lattice's own handshakes with its maker and its visitor |
| Procedural | 1,600 | woven background contact — the hum of ordinary history |
| Near-misses | 14 | ghosts — contact that plausibly should have happened and did not |
Anchors are real. Procedural handshakes are texture, not testimony — statistically shaped stand-ins for the uncountable ordinary contact that history never wrote down. Near-misses are speculative by design and are drawn as grey ghosts, never as fact. Handshakes you add yourself (up to 20) stay in your own browser and are never uploaded.
03Eight domains
greeting · alliance · intimacy · exchange · creation · machine · farewell · crossing — eight meridians, 45 degrees apart, each owning a band of longitude. Greeting is the pure hello; alliance is the treaty and the contract; intimacy is love and kin; exchange is trade and gift; creation is collaborator meeting collaborator; machine is protocol — TCP handshakes count; farewell is the last meeting; crossing is the brief contact of strangers.
04Time as latitude
Latitude −80° is the year 2000 BCE. The equator, 0°, is now — the year 2026. Latitude +80° is 2200 CE. The mapping is not linear: the past is compressed by a power curve, so recent centuries take more of the sphere than distant ones, the way memory works. The future occupies its own latitudes as a cool, probabilistic shimmer — rendered differently on purpose, because it has not happened.
05Determinism
All procedural weaving runs through a seeded pseudo-random generator (mulberry32, seed 20260418). The same lattice grows on every load, for every visitor. The lattice is a place you return to, not a slot machine — what you saw yesterday is where you left it.
06The sound
The melody library holds 86 original tracks. Playback is tuned from concert pitch down to 432 Hz — every source plays at a rate of 432/440 — and analysed live: frequency bands drive the Song lens body, beat intervals estimate BPM, and the spectral centroid reads as brightness of mood.
07Honesty of the instrument
The Lattice is an artwork with a dataset's discipline, not an archive with an artwork's license. What is anchored is labeled; what is woven is procedural; what never happened is a ghost. If you cite The Lattice, cite it as that. Questions are answered in the FAQ; the instrument itself is one click away.