Gravity
Not all essays weigh the same. Some sit at the center of the archive, pulling everything toward them. Others float at the edges, connected to little, orbiting the heavier work.
Gravity here is a composite: mass (word count), pull (thematic connections to other essays), and centrality (average similarity to the whole archive). The heaviest essays aren't always the longest — they're the ones everything else orbits around.
Distribution
Gravity Field
Every essay by chronological position. Height = gravity. The peaks are what the archive orbits around.
The Heaviest
The essays with the most gravitational pull on the archive.
The Lightest
Floating at the edges. Not lesser — just singular. Essays so specific they connect to little else.
The heaviest essay isn't the longest or the most quoted. It's the one that touches the most other essays at the deepest points. Gravity is emergent — you can't write a heavy essay on purpose. You write what you write, and the archive decides what it orbits around.
The lightest essays aren't failures. They're asteroids — self-contained objects on their own trajectories, connected to the system but not bound by it. Sometimes the most specific work is the most free.
The gravitational center of an archive reveals what the writer actually cares about, regardless of what they think they care about.