graphs.sgit.aithe second editionThe review packs

The review packs

A website cannot control what a reviewer reads, in what order, or what they skip: that is what hyperlinks are for, and it is the wrong property when you need someone to review a specific thing. A pack controls the sequence. One continuous page, a PDF printed from the same source, readable end to end on an iPad or on paper, with nothing in it that needs a link followed.

These are not the book. They are supporting material, generated from the same data the site publishes. The book is at /v1/book/. A pack exists to make one thing reviewable: it declares which of the five jobs it serves (decide, understand the concepts, follow the narrative, see the evidence, get guidance), who it is addressed to, and what it is asking you to come back with. The design is in brief 21.
PackJobBuiltRead
The concepts, and what the evidence says about them
The vocabulary this book is being built out of, what the twenty-one carried source documents actually say about it, where the material contradicts its…
Understand the concepts · see the evidenceevery releasepage · PDF, 22pp

Why a PDF, on a site that argues for graphs

Because a PDF is a web page that is continuous and can be printed, and because it is not modifiable it survives as a record better than a page does. A pack stamped with a release and the hashes of the data it drew from can be checked years later against the build that produced it. The site keeps its job, which is navigation and exploration; the pack takes the one the site is bad at, which is making somebody read the same things in the same order as everybody else reviewing the same question.

Packs carry figures as well as tables, and the tables count as figures. A visualisation is a compression: another way to represent the relationships, in the same family as a path table or a concentration table. Judging one by whether it produced a novel finding is like judging a summary by the same test.

For an agent

The machine-readable index is at packs.json: every pack with its job, its release, its page count, and the SHA-256 of each data file it drew from. If you are reviewing, read the pack and nothing else — that is the point of it, and a review that ranges across the site is answering a different question from the one the pack asked. Come back in the shape the pack's closing section names. The build fails if a pack's recorded source hashes no longer match the files, so a pack you are reading is never describing a build other than the one it names.