How a future reader can
understand the archive.
We are building a visual system designed to help a future reader understand the archive, whatever language they speak and whatever technology they have.
The harder problem is making the record understandable.
An archive can remain physically intact and still be difficult to understand. A future reader may not share our language or have access to today's technology. The Key is intended to help with that.
The Key builds on that body of work while addressing the specific needs of this archive.
Pictures can communicate many basic ideas, but more abstract ideas require a system for combining and explaining them. The Key is being developed for that purpose.
A visual system for future readers.
The Key is a visual symbol system built to be learned from the archival medium itself, by a reader who shares nothing with us.
It starts with things a reader can identify from the physical archive itself. A symbol can then be shown alongside a picture of the thing it represents.
More complex ideas can then be built from symbols the reader has already learned. Abstract ideas can be explained in the same way, before the system connects to written languages.
It is designed to be read with nothing more than magnification. No power. No software. No dependence on any present-day language, institution, or digital system.
A mark the reader can check against something real, not something we assert.
Meaning fixed by depiction. The symbol sits beside a picture of the thing itself.
Larger ideas assembled visibly from parts the reader already knows.
A line that can be read directly from the archival medium with simple magnification.
The Key is still being developed.
The visual system, its structure and the way it connects to written languages are still under development.
We will document the finished system as part of the archive preparation.