The Visible Artefact Space
Graphom seeks to model every visible written object in the pre-modern world—manuscripts, fragments, inscriptions, seals, wax tablets, scrolls, graffiti—and also the artefacts now lost but inferable.
It treats the pre-modern script world as a graphosphere: a connected, evolving mesh of codices, scribes, libraries, movements, destructions, transmissions, and the visible shapes they left behind.
Graphom is both a dataset and a research engine:
- A continually expanding corpus drawn from catalogues, IIIF manifests, and archival descriptions.
- A spatial and visualisation model that situates every artefact in time and space.
- A statistical simulation layer that estimates what no longer survives.
- A computation environment for running “pre-modern inference” across places, periods, and genres.
Graphom aims to reconstruct the totality of written artefacts—the pleroma of the pre-modern world.
