Canonical Lexicon

Note on the translation — This translation re-fixes the source text without displacing its substance. A few terms of the corpus have no obvious equivalent in English; the choices made, and how they are to be read, are set out in the section “Translation choices” at the end of the volume. This translation is not frozen: it will evolve with readers’ feedback and with the improvement of the means of translation. The French version is authoritative.

This lexicon is the single definitional source of the corpus: one entry per concept, its definition, its locus, its status. Its main definitional scope is the trilogic core — the three tomes —; the entries of the formal machinery, which live in the Architecture Volume, and the satellite entries, whose locus lies outside the trilogy, are kept here and carry an explicit status that distinguishes them from the core; any entry without a status mark belongs to the core. When there is doubt about a term, the lexicon decides; for the full development, it refers onward. A term absent from here is outside the corpus.

The entries of the second edition carry their arbitrated definition as it stands: they are a little longer than those of the first, and this length is intended — it is the text that is authoritative, term by term. Cross-references are made by document title. The formalisms — state vector, operational times, persistence package — live in the Architecture Volume and have only a cross-reference entry here.

Making

Flow of the real — The real as it flows, which always exceeds the cuts made in it — its continuity and inexhaustibility describing important cases, not axioms, and its indifference being said of the pre-existing referent of observation — and which never pauses to let itself be counted; before any measurement, the world is already passing. Its exact status (a choice of outlook, not a dogma) is fixed by the Preface to the Edition. (Trilogy, Tome 1; substance.)

Drawing — The gesture that detaches a fragment from the flow and fixes it: a place, an instant, a way of measuring. It carries an intention, criteria, a point of view; one does not collect data, one draws them. (Tome 1; substance.)

Act of inscription — The moment when someone perceives, distinguishes, aims at a fragment of the real and inscribes it on a medium: it is this act that brings the datum into being. An intentional and situated act — the intention may be delegated to an instrument without dissolving into it. (Tome 1; Human Reading, Automatic Reading; substance.)

The undrawn — Everything that the choice of annotating excludes: to inscribe is to retain one thing and let a thousand slip by. The undrawn leaves no datum, but it weighs on what data can say. (Tome 1; substance.)

Trace — Legible real; not yet a datum. Three characteristics: caused (no intention presides over its formation), physically linked to what produced it, legible but unread. (The Trace and the Reader; Architecture Volume; substance.)

Blind ingestion / delegated ingestion — Two regimes of the act entrusted to an instrument. Blind: the flow enters by mere absorption, without intention, without criterion, without record — the negation of drawing, proscribed; what enters is a trace, not a datum. Delegated: a mandated drawing, whose intention and criteria are set in advance and whose choice is recorded. The line does not run through automatism, but through the presence of a condition and of a record. (Human Reading, Automatic Reading, section “Blind Ingestion and Delegated Ingestion”; substance.)

Datum — An entity constituted by a regulated operation — observational, institutional or derived —, historically individualized, relationally maintained; circulation is a frequent and structuring regime of it, not its universal destination; the dated drawing, fixed by an act of inscription, is its observational route. Its existence owes nothing to reading: a datum that no one reads remains constituted — not actualized, and mute for this particular reader. (Trilogy; substance.)

Reference corpus — What surrounds the datum and makes it legible: its criteria, its context, its vocabulary. A datum is a sentence; the corpus is the grammar that makes it legible. (Tome 1; Architecture Volume; substance.)

Freshness — The proximity of the datum to the present of the world. It cannot be recovered: one does not rejuvenate a datum, one draws another. (Tome 1; substance.)

Lapse — The gap that grows between the datum, which has stayed still, and the world, which has carried on. A relation, not an alteration: the datum does not spoil, the real moves away. Its speed depends on the piece of the world that has been drawn. (Tome 1; substance.)

The three ages — Fresh, ripening, archival: the undergone ageing of the datum, seen from the side of the widening gap. To be articulated with the three relations to the flow (below), which are their regulated implementation. (The Flow and the Annotation; substance.)

Stable sources / tended stable source — Data whose real drifts so slowly that one can build on them: a long duration, not an eternity. Tended: kept attuned to the real by deliberate care (the agreed, the armature). (Tome 1; Complementary Notes; substance.)

Flow of observation — A regulated, cadenced series of drawings on the same fragment of the real: where a bucket gave only an instant, the canal gives back a current. (Tome 1; substance.)

Canal — The mastered course of a flow of observation: one can follow it, go back up it to its spring, connect it to others, entrust it, fill it in. Poorer than the river, but one’s own. (Tome 1; substance.)

Cadence — The rhythm of drawings, which offsets the lapse of each drop by the renewal of the whole. (Tome 1; substance.)

Observational optimum — For every flow of observation, there exists an optimal setting — neither drawing too much nor too little. An existence statement, open to refutation. (Digging the Canal, “The Optimum Depends on the Context of the Observed Subject”; substance.)

Consolidated datum — The synthetic informational grain extracted from a flow of observation (average, total, exact and without a leap), reusable beyond the act that produced its sources. A species of the genus derived. (The Flow and the Annotation; substance.)

Verisimilar datum — A datum guaranteed not by the real but by a model: the hypothesis that the real has continued to behave as the model describes it. The act of drawing remains; the object changes. A species of the genus derived. (The Two Times of the Datum; substance.)

Workbench — the place where the artisan keeps their work and inscribes their acts; each workbench keeps its own journal. An artisan may have several workbenches (the one in the workshop, the one on the building site); a single device may carry several. The workbenches of the same artisan converge by replay of acts. To be distinguished from the station (the sovereign server of the datum) and from the workshop (the agent workshop). An entry inherited from the first edition, taken up word for word from the homonymous entry of its canonical lexicon, section “Making”. No document of the three tomes, nor the Architecture Volume, makes it a locus; the second edition holds it, by a decision of scope, to be a satellite entry.

The three intentions — What makes constitution a regulated and imputable act without requiring a conscious will at each inscription. The intention of the apparatus — why the capture system was designed: the intention deposited in the instrument, the protocol, the institution. The intention of the occurrence — does an agent decide to produce this particular recording. The intention of use — why a mark is treated as a datum now, down to the residue captured without design that use recruits. Carried by different actors, at different moments: a datum can be intentionally structured without being intended occurrence by occurrence. (The Trace and the Reader, “Caused versus Intended”; substance.)

Differential traceability — The exact status of the legibility of the real: many processes leave marks, but no mark exhausts its cause and no total traceability is guaranteed. Four degrees are distinguished — causal marking, preserved trace, accessible trace, interpretable trace — and equivocation remains possible: different processes leave similar marks. “No knowledge has any route other than the trace” stands; “everything is legible, everywhere” falls. (The Trace and the Reader; substance.)

The three families of constitution — Three ways for a datum to be born. Observational: from a drawing on the world — an interaction leaves a trace, the act constitutes it as a result under criteria. Institutional: from an act that institutes — under a constitutive rule, the recording takes part in making the social fact it inscribes. Derived: from other data, by a regulated operation. The measurement drawing ceases to be the implicit prototype of every datum; real chains braid the three families together. (The Flow and the Annotation; substance.)

Institutional datum — Born of an act that institutes rather than of a measurement: the inscribed marriage, the counted vote, the registered title, the closed balance. Under the constitutive rule, the inscription does not describe an independent phenomenon — it takes part in bringing into existence the fact it registers. Its truth is not checked against the world; it is contested before the rule and the authority that instituted it. Its provenance names the act, the rule, the institution. (The Flow and the Annotation; substance.)

Derived datum (genus) — Born of other data by a regulated operation: parent data, model or transformation, new result, new provenance. A genus of which the corpus already holds three species — the consolidated, the verisimilar, recounting in the technical sense. The family extends: correction, annotation, classification, estimation, prediction, synthetic datum — and translation, according to the declared invariants: altered, a descendant; preserved, a new occurrence of the same datum, the operation and the source text being inscribed in the provenance in both cases. Every derived datum opens a filiation; its provenance includes the model and the parent data. (The Flow and the Annotation; mechanics of filiation in The Properties of Movement; substance.)

Validity for a use — What lapse becomes once decomposed: not a uniform law of ageing, but a relation. A datum is valid for a use — a function of the object aimed at, of the question asked, of the instant, of the tolerance admitted. The same inscription may be stale for the alert and accurate for history: the statement concerning the past does not age like the one that claims to tell the present. (The Two Times of the Datum; substance.)

Circulation

Act of exchange — The second founding gesture, symmetrical to the act of inscription: human, intentional, situated, dated and unrepeatable, carrying a cost and a responsibility of its own, that of putting into circulation. It extends availability and the possibility of use; it accomplishes neither the datum nor reading. (The Act of Exchange; substance. Inherited from the first edition.)

Transport medium — What carries the datum out of its birthplace, in three minimal functions: moving, transmitting, making accessible. Resumption does not rest on a third medium: it requires conditions of interpretive resumption. (The Act of Exchange; substance. Inherited from the first edition.)

Fixation — What makes movement possible: the datum navigates because it is fixed. The content does not move; the inscription moves with its medium, or is duplicated onto a second medium. (Tome 2; substance.)

Copying without division — To transmit a datum by duplication — the dominant mode —, is to copy it: the carriers multiply, the datum remains one; moving the medium that carries it transmits it without copying it. Commons and the irreversible leak are the same law seen from two sides. (Tome 2, manifesto; substance.)

Spatial navigation / temporal navigation — The two trips of every transport: the medium that changes place (intended, directed); the real that moves away during the trip (undergone). To transport is always also to let age. (Tome 2, manifesto; substance.)

Fidelity (of transport) — Has the datum arrived intact, and accompanied by what makes it legible? A datum may arrive whole and yet illegible, detached from its corpus. (Tome 2; substance.)

Propagation — The aggregate of transports: the datum present in several places through the sum of the acts that carried it. To propagate the datum is not to propagate knowledge: the reader’s share does not travel with it. (Transport and Propagation; substance. Inherited from the first edition.)

Torrent / over-throughput — The regime in which infinitely more data pass before each reader than that reader will ever be able to receive. (Tome 2, manifesto; substance.)

Self-amplification loop — Circulation that engenders more circulation; the trilogy recognizes two engines of it. A statement open to refutation. (Self-Amplification; substance.)

Collective wisdom — The dosage of readings carried to the level of a collective: who frames what, who delegates to whom, what one consents together not to read — knowing that abstention is never neutral there. A reflexive level: the collective gives itself the means of knowing what it reads and what it does not read. (Self-Amplification, Tome 3; substance.)

Datum of origin — What the act of inscription brings into being and what every copy instantiates: the dated drawing, identified by its origin — which act, on which fragment of the real, under which criteria — and not by the number of its carriers. Occurrences multiply; the datum of origin remains one. (The Properties of Movement; substance.)

Occurrence — The singular inscription of a datum on a medium, in a place, at an instant: what is counted when one copies. Transmitting by duplication multiplies occurrences; the datum remains one — copying without division, seen from the medium; moving a carrier medium transmits the same occurrence without multiplying it. An occurrence, once it has taken place, is not crossed out: revision is a new inscription. (The Properties of Movement; substance.)

Filiation — The link of descent between data: a transformation — correction, aggregation, inference, summary, translation altering a declared invariant — produces, from a parent datum, a new datum; translation that preserves the invariants is only a faithful conversion, a new occurrence of the same datum, the operation and the source text being inscribed in the provenance in both cases. Descendant, not copy: the copy multiplies the occurrences of one datum; transformation opens a filiation. (The Properties of Movement; substance.)

Provenance — What the datum must be able to say about how it was made: from which act it was born, through which operations and which hands it has passed. Constitutive, not decorative: without it, identity and imputability lose their footing. For a derived datum, it includes the model and the parent data. (The Properties of Movement; substance.)

Conditions of interpretive resumption — What the third act requires and what no homogeneous medium provides. For a transmitted datum to be resumed — read at the other end —, all of the following are needed together: a reachable occurrence, a living code, a practicable interface, a reference corpus, competencies, a community, a body. Fixation has its medium, transport has its own; resumption has no medium — it has conditions. Their loss makes the datum go down the scale. (The Act of Exchange; substance.)

Reception

Act of reading — The act by which a situated reader produces a meaning from an arrived datum. It actualizes; it does not re-found the existence of the datum, and applies only to decipherable inscription, never to raw trace. Reading reactivates nothing and produces nothing: inscribing what one has read is a consecutive act, a distinct one. (The Act of Reading; substance.)

Exit threshold — What follows reading without being part of it: inscribing, calculating, saying, acting — or nothing. Consecutive acts, distinct from the act of reading, which produces nothing by itself. (The Act of Reading; substance. Inherited from the first edition.)

Situated position of handling or processing — A functional and bounded place in the chain, from which an arrived datum is handled, processed or relayed; no reading is from nowhere, and the universal reader is a contradiction in terms. A human or a machine may occupy it; occupying it does not make the machine an actual reader. (Human Reading, Automatic Reading; substance.)

Actual reader — The agent for whom a meaning is actualized: the one whose reading, in a situation, makes of an arrived datum a living meaning. A machine occupying a situated position of handling or processing is an actual reader only if a meaning is actualized for it, a possibility the trilogy does not settle; failing that, it processes, classifies or relays. Imputability remains with the agents and institutions that design, delegate, retain and use its results. (Human Reading, Automatic Reading; substance.)

Window — The bounded portion of what files past, cut out by what the reader is. It does not shut in: it makes reading possible — it is because it cuts out that it shows. Instruments move it, never abolish it. (The Situated Reader; The Trace and the Reader; substance.)

The reader’s share — What the receiver needs — the time, the means, the code — for the journey to be accomplished. It is not transported with the datum; making it practicable is a condition of delivery. (Tome 2, Tome 3; substance.)

Mute datum — An interpretation exists, but this particular reader does not possess it. A relative and reversible state: mute for me today, speaking for another, or for me tomorrow. (Tome 3, manifesto; substance.)

Dead datum — No reader, anywhere, can interpret it any longer: the key has died out. A limit-ideal: only the trace remains, and taking hold of it one day would be a new act of inscription, under another description. (Tome 3, manifesto; substance.)

The three paths (ways of not actualizing) — Why a datum is not read: incapacity (remediable — the referent, without forcing secrets), disinterest (a matter of posture), rapid lapse (the normal fate of an immense part of the daily output). Not all unread data are failures. (The Over-Plus, manifesto; substance.)

The three postures — Frame (choose one’s window), delegate (inherit another’s window), accept (consent lucidly to what escapes). Their dosage engages the reader’s probity: knowing what one reads, what one does not read, what one has handed over to another. (The Three Postures, manifesto; substance.)

Referent — Anyone who, on the subject to which a datum refers, knows more than the reader who stumbles. A relative position, not an instituted function; it is what grounds recourse. (Tome 3; substance.)

The data artisan (a craft yet to be created) — The referent of the datum’s own domain: drawing with probity, regulating a canal, judging a freshness, framing a window. A proposal, not an established result: the craft does not yet exist; the trilogy calls for its creation. (Route opened in Transport and Propagation, necessity established in The Self-Knowing Reader; competency framework in the volume The Data Artisan, where the artisan also goes by the name of canal-keeper; substance for the necessity, form for the framework.)

State lapse / use-by limit — The first death is not an instant but a threshold: the point where the gap with the real exceeds what use tolerates — it is the crossing of the threshold for a given use (see validity for a use). Intrinsic when the object fixes it, otherwise held by an age default; its setting is a workshop gesture (Technical Data, ch. 5). (The Trace or the Datum; substance for the principle, form for the setting.)

The three relations to the flow — Fresh (serves the act), consolidated (serves the assessment: its summable part has been extracted), lapsed (serves memory: window closed, inscription remaining). Regulated states that the work gives to ageing — the implementation of the three ages. (The Trace or the Datum; substance.)

Lapsed datum — The datum whose reading window has closed on the present; still legible, hence reopenable. Lapsed (a regulated state) and not merely stale (a continuous gap). (Tome 3; substance.)

Recounting (technical sense) — The inscription consecutive to the rereading of a lapsed datum: a new datum, a form with acknowledged loss, which makes the meaning re-readable and defers the second death. Proof, for its part, remains with the consolidated. A species of the genus derived. (The Trace or the Datum; substance.)

Systemic leap — The change of scale that changes nature: what the LLM does to the storage and processing of the datum (Complementary Notes), and to reception (The Canal and the Workshops, ch. 10). (Digging the Canal, “Part VII — The Systemic Leap”; mixed.)

The scale of the datum — Five cumulative states, relative to a reader and to an instant: constituted → accessible → intelligible → actualized → operative. A datum can be constituted without being accessible, accessible without being intelligible, intelligible without being read, read without nourishing anything. The scale replaces falling back into trace everywhere — except in the limit case: the dead datum. (The Trace or the Datum; substance.)

Constituted datum — What the act of inscription brings into existence: a result produced and stabilized according to a rule, dated, provided with its provenance. Its existence owes nothing to reading: a datum that no one reads remains constituted — not actualized, never fallen back into trace. (The Trace or the Datum; substance.)

Accessible datum — Constituted, and reachable for this particular reader: an available occurrence, a practicable path, an open access. Relative to the reader, to the place, to the instant — the reader’s share, seen from the datum. (The Trace or the Datum; substance.)

Intelligible datum — Accessible, and legible for a community: the code, the reference corpus, the competencies are alive there. Relative still: unintelligible for this particular reader, it is that reader’s mute datum; unintelligible for all, it is the dead datum, a limit-ideal. (The Trace or the Datum; substance.)

Actualized datum — Read: a situated reader has actually produced a meaning from it in a situation. Actualization is an act, not an update; it is this — and this alone — that reading adds to the datum. (The Trace or the Datum; substance.)

Operative datum — Actualized, and passed into the world: its reading has contributed to an inference, a coordination or an action. The modified real will yield new traces — this is where the loop closes. (The Trace or the Datum; loop in The Self-Knowing Reader; substance.)

Re-circulating datum — A datum really produced by automated inscription, but which no human reads, and which goes round among machines without crossing the threshold of reading. It is constituted — by an inherited intention — and remains non-actualized. (Human Reading, Automatic Reading; substance. Taken up, renamed, from the corresponding entry of the first edition: the automaton produces data, not traces.)

Responsibility of the chain — What ontology becomes when the loop closes: an ontology of the responsibility of the chain, not of the mere materiality of its links. When the operative datum feeds action and the modified real yields new traces, responsibility lodges in no single link — it runs from the regulated apparatus to the act that constitutes, from transformation to reading, from reading to decision. Each link answers for its gesture and passes on to the next what it needs in order to answer; provenance is the documentary form of this responsibility. (The Self-Knowing Reader; substance.)

Decomposed probity — The artisan’s probity, made decomposable: probity of constitution, of preservation, of selection, of transformation, of presentation, of inference, of use. Seven places where one can answer — or fail — separately: a chain can keep its probity in constitution and be at fault in presentation. The evidentiary regime — chain of custody, corroboration — is its practical horizon. (The Self-Knowing Reader; substance.)

The Work and Its Tending — Satellite Entries

Nine entries whose locus lies outside the trilogy — Complementary Notes, SGQA, Technical Data, The Canal and the Workshops —, kept and credited; their terminal cross-reference is a declared satellite provenance, not a resolved locus. The entry “Workbench”, of the same status, remains in its place under “Making”. They do not fall under the coverage obligation of the translation tables; the equivalents that the translation charter keeps for some of them remain there on behalf of the satellite volumes, like the canal-keeper.

The agreed — The shared language in which an activity draws, and through which its datum becomes legible to another: a tended stable source. (Satellite — Complementary Notes, SGQA; mixed.)

Envelope — Quality as the tending of the agreed: what envelops the drawings of an activity and keeps them attuned to the shared language. Unrelated to the clay envelopes (bullae) of history (Tome 1), which are objects, not a concept. (Satellite — Complementary Notes; mixed.)

Armature — The canal dug in stable sources: the types and formats drawn from the agreed. It is versioned and revised, deliberately, when the convention shifts. (Satellite — Complementary Notes, Technical Data; mixed.)

Craft matrix — The modelling of one’s own work: the conditioned sequence of the states of the workpiece — in what order they follow one another, under what condition one passes from one to the next —, written by the artisan alone, adjusted to the observational optimum, through which the artisan steers the activity along the planned trajectory. It borders the heart of the craft, it does not dictate it: the progress of the workpiece, never the gesture. To be distinguished from the management matrix (the relations of an activity) and from the support matrix (the automatable part, common and generic). (Satellite — SGQA section III; substance for the principle, form for any diagram that illustrates it.)

Seam point — The junction of the generic (the agreed, the common register) and the craft (its own gesture): where a generic drawing — an accepted order — becomes the head of a craft process each of whose traversed states is a dated act of inscription in the canal of the craft. The place of the highest-value datum (the “how it is done”); the modelling threshold belongs to the artisan. (Satellite — SGQA section III; substance for the principle, form for its software embodiment.)

Bearer / borne — The bearer has a reading window of its own; the borne exists only through it: it is born, circulates, passes into lapse and goes down in a cluster with its bearer. The mark of dependence is shared fate. (Satellite — Complementary Notes; mixed.)

Reference (the edge) — The connection that does not bind existence: two autonomous data that designate each other without depending on each other — to be distinguished from the borne. (Satellite — Complementary Notes, Technical Data; mixed.)

The reserve — The frozen double of the work, withdrawn from the cycle of use (not from the flow: there is no outside-the-flow), written once, never rewritten, mobilized only to restore; kept by rotating generations. (Satellite — Technical Data ch. 9; form.)

High-value datum — Well drawn, well dated, well traced (canonical definition: SGQA, foreword). It is the datum worth sharing: reliable, situated in its reference corpus, of known freshness. (Satellite — SGQA; mixed.)

The Formal Machinery

Three terms live in the Architecture Volume and have only a cross-reference entry here: the tomes presuppose nothing of them.

State vector — The state of a datum for a reader, an instant, a use, decomposed into seven independent components: existence of an occurrence, fixity, integrity, authenticity and continuity of provenance, accessibility, intelligibility, validity. Each evolves without dragging the others along; the two deaths remain, in the tomes, the images of its typical collapses. (Architecture Volume; formal machinery — zero occurrences in the tomes.)

Operational times — The operational deployment of the two regimes of time: event, observation, inscription, processing, transmission, reception, reading, action. Coincident in the simple apparatus, divergent in real infrastructures — causal order is not to be confused with the order of clocks, and the time of the process is documented: it is not assumed to be single. (Architecture Volume; formal machinery — a single mention in prose in Tome 1.)

Persistence package — What a durable datum is: not a value-medium pair, but a package — content, occurrence, encoding, schema, provenance, context, representation information, access conditions, validity regime — intended for a community that will know how to read it. The loss of a layer does not always destroy the whole; it reduces what the datum can sustain. (Architecture Volume; formal machinery — zero occurrences in the tomes.)

Translation choices

These notes say how to read the English words that render the terms of the corpus; they are fixed for the whole English translation by the Translation Charter of the Corpus.

• datum / data. The corpus defines the datum as an individual entity: constituted, historically individualized, relationally maintained. The translation therefore says datum in the singular — unusual but exact, the Latin for “what is given” — and data as its plural, construed as a plural.
• drawing / to draw (prélèvement, prélever). The gesture of drawing from the flow, as one draws water, or blood: situated, carrying an intention and criteria. Sampling is avoided: it would shift the meaning towards statistics. The undrawn (non-prélevé) is what the drawing leaves in the flow.
• lapse (péremption). A relation, not a decay: the gap that grows between a datum that stays still and a world that carries on, as a right lapses with time. Lapsed (péremptée) names a regulated state, stale (périmée) the continuous gap. Expiry is kept for regulatory contexts. State lapse / use-by limit: the threshold set for a given use.
• canal. The canal dug in the river, for irrigation; never a communication channel. Canal-keeper (canalier), coined on lighthouse-keeper, is the one who digs and tends the canal; the word belongs to the satellite volumes.
• spring (source), in the image of water: the canal can be followed back up to its spring. Never a data source; source keeps its ordinary sense elsewhere (“the source text”).
• actualized (actualisée). The act of reading, by which a meaning is produced; never the updating of a file. Reading actualizes; it does not constitute.
• datum of origin. What the act of inscription brings into being, identified by its origin and not by the number of its carriers; occurrence is a singular inscription on a medium, what is counted when one copies; provenance is not origin.
• verisimilar datum. A datum guaranteed by a model, not by the real; plausible would weaken it.
• recounting (récit, technical sense). The re-inscription that follows the rereading of a lapsed datum: a new datum, with acknowledged loss. The ordinary sense of récit (a narrative) takes the ordinary word.
• the agreed (le convenu). A deliberate substantivation: the shared language in which an activity draws.
• referent. The person one turns to, who knows more than the reader who stumbles; never the semantic referent, except where the text says “the referent of observation”.
• over-throughput (sur-débit). Arrivals that exceed the capacity to read; neither an overload nor an overflow.
• persistence package. The echo of the archival information package is intended.
• transport medium. The material vehicle of transport; distinct from the medium of fixation. Medium (support, plural media) carries the inscription; carrier (porteur) holds an occurrence.
• apparatus (dispositif) belongs to the three intentions (“intention of the apparatus”); the apparat of the Architecture Volume is the formal machinery. Locus (plural loci) renders foyer, the single place where a contribution is demonstrated.
• Making, circulation, reception (fabrication, circulation, réception): the three phases of the datum, one per tome; fabrication in English would suggest falsification.
• frame / delegate / accept: the three postures; framing, delegation, acceptance as nouns.
• record renders trace in its ordinary sense (“without record”, “the presence of a record”, in the entry on ingestion); trace is kept for the concept. Course renders the tracé of a canal.
• substance / form / mixed (fond, forme, mixte): the status that closes each entry.
• Titles. Tried by the Flow renders À l’épreuve du flux: the datum put to the test of the flow. The three tomes: The River and the Canal, From Spring to Torrent, The Trace or the Datum.