Sunday, July 26, 2026

SyntheticLegibility * https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20356851



SyntheticLegibility names the deliberately constructed capacity of heterogeneous materials to become readable across different human and computational systems. It is synthetic because legibility does not pre-exist the relations among titles, identifiers, metadata, categories, interfaces, indexes and conceptual descriptions; it must be produced. The operator rejects both the fantasy of raw transparency and the reduction of complexity to a single standard. Every legible system selects, translates and orders, thereby making some relations visible while obscuring others. SyntheticLegibility therefore requires that these operations remain inspectable and revisable. Its aim is not universal simplification but sufficient correspondence: distinct materials should be retrievable, comparable and connectable without being treated as identical. The operator becomes effective when human interpretation and machine recognition can operate upon the same corpus while preserving provenance, ambiguity and difference. SyntheticLegibility succeeds when access is increased without concealing the decisions through which access was made possible, turning readability from an assumed property into an accountable infrastructure.

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