Topics

Focus areas that cut across projects, methods, and notes.

A topic collects work that belongs together across sections: the project that demonstrated something, the method it applied, and the note that argued for it. Sections answer what kind of thing a page is. Topics answer what it is part of.

Two neighbors to this page. Clusters group work by an argument rather than a subject, and kinds of thing indexes it by what each page is — a method, a note, a finished publication.

  • Whether information is usable by the people it concerns. Treated as a property of the work rather than a review step at the end of it.

  • Working with real datasets: what they recorded, what they omit, and what can be concluded from them.

  • How resources are produced, distributed and valued, including the models used to describe that and their limits.

  • How decisions get made and who is accountable for them, in institutions and in data systems alike.

  • Stated courses of action by bodies with authority, the instruments that enact them, and what happens when they meet delivery.

  • Charts and dashboards a public audience can actually read, and that the organization publishing them can afford to keep running. Narrower than either parent: the subject is the intersection, where legibility and maintainability turn out to be the same problem.

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rhizae
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