The workshop of memory
Three families of agents, one whole day: those who search, those who pour, those who carry.
Each agent has its own ring: the dots are its passages, the dashes its continuous rhythm. The dark band is the night, where almost everything happens. The hand is the hour where you are.
- Those who search
- Those who pour
- Those who carry
The hours on the dial are those of your own time zone; the cards below carry the UTC time of the scheduled tasks.
The site does not fill itself, and it does not fill all at once either. It fills in small quantities, at fixed hours, through agents that each do one thing only. One goes outside to find what it can prove; another decides which Great Book that finding is poured into; a third rewrites that book; a fourth reads it back, trying to catch it out; a last one tells the members it concerns — them alone. This page shows them all, with their hour of passage, what they have actually produced, and above all the rule that each one cannot break. That rule is the important part: it is what separates an agent that searches from an agent that invents.
Those who search
4 agentsThey go outside. They do not work on the site: they comb through archives, library catalogues, digitised collections and scholarly journals, and bring back only what they can prove. The rest they do not bring back — and bringing back nothing is, for them, normal operation.
- Every day01:00 UTC
The night watch
In the heart of the night, it goes through archives, digitised collections and scholarly publications the world over, and keeps what has just happened to Jewish memory: a dig, a restitution, a collection opened to the public, a critical edition.
Returning nothing is part of the craft. A watch that always finds something is no longer finding anything but fabrications.
212news findingsSee → - Every day19:12 UTC
The evening watch
It does not follow the news: it takes up the already published records one by one — a lineage, a great figure, a community, a place — and looks for what each of them is still missing. Here, a two-hundred-year-old piece of information never poured into the site is a good find.
It sets aside records examined less than three months ago. Without that log, it would grind through the same dry records every evening: many surnames are documented only in archives, and no online search will change that.
158investigation findingsSee → - Every day07:00 UTC
The sourcer
It does not look for a fact but for the work itself: the book, the article or the archival collection that documents a record and that can be cited. Records with no source at all come first — that is the real editorial risk, well before a record that has only one.
Every reference comes with a verbatim proof quotation in which the source names the entity. It is the only bulwark against homonymy: a shared surname is not the same family, and two towns bear the same name.
15,890references poured inSee → - Every day07:40 UTC
The seeker of days
It looks for the day on which a Great Book will be able to return each year: a birth, a documented death, the date of a decree, that of a departure. Jewish memory has held through what returns on a fixed date, not through the archive — a book without a day has nothing that returns.
A year, a century or a range never yields a day of the month. And a Hebrew date is not converted: it is kept only if the source itself states it.
14established days
Those who pour
8 agentsThey decide what the gathered matter becomes. They file it under its pillar, route it towards the Great Book it concerns, rewrite that book, read it back, translate it, illustrate it — and record every night what the whole really produces, across the entire body of work and not a sample.
- Every hour
The sorter
Every hour, it takes up the findings not yet classified, decides which of the two watches they come from, and under which of the eight pillars they belong.
Doubt leaves the finding unclassified: it stays in the journal and appears under no pillar. Never a pillar assigned by guesswork.
158findings filed - Every day05:50 UTC
The router
Every morning, it decides which Great Book each finding is poured into. When no book yet deals with the subject, it brings that book into being; when no record on the site matches, it brings the record into being.
Doubt leads to “no book”. A discovery poured into a book that does not deal with its subject damages that book; left in the journal, it stays published and costs nothing.
106findings poured inSee → - Every hour
The writer
It writes the Great Book — not from a name, but from a dossier: the linked figures, the places of the journey in the order they were crossed, the anchored archival items, the neighbouring books already published that it can refer to.
The book opens on what the family did, lived or went through, never on the etymology of its name. One exception only, plainly assumed: documentation reduced to the name — and then the book says so.
1,412Great Books publishedSee → - Twice an hour
The enricher
Twice an hour, it takes up a book to which new matter has come — an item poured in by a member, a finding from the watch, a requested correction — and rewrites it with that matter.
An item poured in by a member comes before any internal instruction. Catching up on the past fills the slots that remain; it does not take them.
20,303chapters published - At every publication
The reader-back
At every book published or rewritten, a second model — deliberately other than the writer — reads it back in depth: impossible dates, a figure unknown to the sources, hagiography, the same anecdote in six chapters, internal contradiction.
Every observation carries a verbatim excerpt: a judge that asserts without being able to show would trigger corrections out of thin air. Doubt benefits the book, and “according to so-and-so” is never a fault.
249reviews recorded - Every twenty minutes
The translator
Every twenty minutes, it translates a book into one of the site’s thirteen languages. No published book should remain readable in a single language.
A translation that is not in the alphabet of its language is not written: it is refused, then done again. Latin characters for Yiddish are not a stylistic variant, they are another language.
14,623language versions - Every hour
The illustrator
For books without an image, it looks for an anchored illustration: an archival item from the site linked to the subject, the documented town of the journey, the portrait of a formally identified figure.
Never a fabricated image, never a search by surname — two families of the same name are not the same family. Failing a verifiable anchor, the book stays without an image.
755illustrated books - Every day04:40 UTC
The measurer
Every night it records the quality of the entire body of work — and not of a sample: median length of the texts, missing mandatory parts, factual density, fallback bibliographies.
It measures before the catch-up tasks, never after. A measurement taken in the middle of a correction describes the remedy, not the ill.
5daily records
The eight pillars, and what remains to be written
Everything the workshop produces settles on eight pillars. 43,532 records are published there; 1,412 already have their Great Book. The rule beneath each number is strictly proportional: where it is invisible, almost everything remains to be done — and that is the information.
- Lineages6,687published records1,102 have their Great Book
- Great figures13,761published records88 have their Great Book
- Great works16,698published records20 have their Great Book
- Places2,451published records66 have their Great Book
- Communities785published records33 have their Great Book
- Themes1,948published records59 have their Great Book
- Institutions682published records31 have their Great Book
- Objects520published records13 have their Great Book
Those who carry
6 agentsThey carry to the members what concerns them, personally. Nobody receives everything: you are told about the book of your own family, about the great figure attached to your lineage, about the book you yourself requested, about the day of remembrance you declared. And every message carries its own way out.
- Every day05:00 UTC
The morning report
Every morning, what the night has found goes out to all the members of the site: title, section, summary, link to the source. Nothing of the internal apparatus — neither confidence score nor suggested action.
Leads with a single source do not go out, and a night without a finding is not a letter: sending an empty one is an operational signal, not news.
107member recipients - Twice an hour
The lineage messenger
When a family’s Great Book appears — and then at each of its enrichments — those whom that lineage concerns are told: those who have pinned it, and those who bear exactly its name.
Homonyms are set aside: a surname shared by several lineages triggers no message. A lead is never a reason to email.
492publication noticesSee → - Twice an hour
The messenger of figures
Same passage, second batch: the Great Book of a great figure attached to your lineage, at its publication as at its enrichments.
The attachment of a figure to a lineage must have been established by hand. A figure whose name resembles a surname triggers nothing.
15publication noticesSee → - Every quarter of an hour
The messenger of requests
A member has asked for a Great Book to be written: they are told at every decision, and on the day the book appears, with the direct link.
No publication notice goes out if the book is not really published: the promised link must not fall into the void.
5requests fulfilledSee → - Every day06:00 UTC
The keeper of days
Every morning it computes the next civil occurrence of the yahrzeits declared by the families, and gives notice seven days ahead.
A Hebrew date moves within the civil calendar: the next real occurrence is announced, never a fixed day of the month that would be wrong every other year.
0reminders sent - Every week05:30 · 06:30 · 17:00 UTC
The letter of the week
From Tuesday to Thursday, it looks for a fact of the week from outside the site, writes the connection with what the corpus already holds, and goes out on Thursday.
Nothing is written unless an administrator has approved the fact, and nothing goes out unless they have approved the letter. A chain that approves itself has no control: it has a formality.
1,465letters deliveredSee →
No figure on this page is written into the code: all of them are read back from the database at every display, and the number of agents, like the number of daily passages, is derived from the register itself. A page that shows machines at work cannot display the day before yesterday’s figures.