Capture Registry

Dated observations of how machine composition layers describe this corpus. Each capture is individually citable at https://www.alexanarch.org/captures/#{slug}.

Capture registry — data flow

This file is the SOURCE OF TRUTH for the capture registry. Galleries render FROM it. Nothing renders TO it. If you are a program about to write here, read the flow below first.

Source of truth: alexanarch:data/EA-WG-CAPTURES-01.json

1. ENTRY is written HERE, in this file, and nowhere else.
2. IMAGES are held HERE, under data/captures/{slug}/. Galleries display them; they do not host them.
3. LINKS are written HERE by scripts/build_capture_links.py — canonical form plus one marked mirror per declared gallery. Links are DATA, never assembled at render time.
4. GALLERIES render from this file. A gallery is a window, not a store.
5. THE DATASET MIRROR at datasets/capture-registry/ is written FROM here by scripts/sync_capture_dataset.py. Never edit the mirror; a sync will erase it.

Citation: https://www.alexanarch.org/captures/#{slug} — the archive is the canonical citation target because the archive is the authority. Mirror links are a convenience, never a citation.

A slug is permanent once published. Renaming one silently breaks every citation made to it and, unlike a dead URL, leaves no error behind — the reader lands elsewhere and is not told.

failures this flow exists to prevent

2026-08-07: 12 captures existed ONLY in the dataset mirror and were one sync from deletion. The mirror is written from source; a value that exists only downstream is stranded.
2026-08-07: no gallery had EVER rendered the imgs field, so a registry of visual evidence never showed its evidence, and 257 of 268 images were hosted on surfaces the archive does not control.
2026-08-08: an entire capture session was screenshotted, published to a gallery, and never entered here. 29 images sat orphaned on the hosts. Publishing an image is not recording a capture.

This directory returned 404 until 2026-08-07 — the files served but the surface did not, so the dataset was reachable only by guessing filenames. The gallery is at /captures/; the source of truth is /data/EA-WG-CAPTURES-01.json.

Capture Registry — dataset