A lexicon for the atlas.

A pathway is a guided route through the index: film, books, music, anime, and place arranged in an order that means something. Each step carries the editorial reasoning for why one work follows another — thematic continuation, cross-media resonance, regional depth. Pathways are written, not generated.

A current is a line of feeling or thought that runs through otherwise distant works — "Tokyo noir", "melancholy romance", "political memory". Currents are how the index holds works together without genre buckets: they name what the works share, not where a store would shelve them.

A corridor is the passage between neighborhoods of the index: the route by which Hong Kong longing reaches Tokyo unease, or postwar fiction reaches nocturnal jazz. Corridors are drawn by editors where the connection can be argued, and they are how a search or a pathway widens without losing its line.

A collection gathers works around a deliberate editorial argument: a season, an anniversary, a question worth holding several works against. Collections are smaller and more occasional than pathways — an arrangement on a table rather than a route on a map.

The Field Map draws the entire index as one connected field: works as nodes, editorial bridges as lines, currents and regions as the gravity that clusters them. It is a way of seeing the terrain before choosing a route — and every node opens into the work, region, or pathway it stands for.

A region is a cultural anchor with editorial weight: Seoul, Lagos, Buenos Aires. Each region page holds the works rooted there, the currents that pass through it, and the pathways that use it as ground. Regions are context, not travel guides.

Every entry in the index traces to a canonical source — Wikidata, MusicBrainz, the institutions of record. A work is admitted when it improves a path, not to inflate a number. The catalog grows to be accurate, not large.

The Shelf is where a member keeps what matters: saved works, pathways paused mid-route, private notes about where to return. It is a desk, not a watchlist — nothing on it is public, nothing on it is ranked, and nothing on it feeds anyone an algorithm.