How this map is made

Every shape on the map comes from a record, and no step is drawn by hand. A taller mesa means I went further into that field. It says nothing about how much the field matters.

The ledger

Each entry is a paper, patent, project, post or note, tagged with the fields it belongs to. It sits at the highest of five layers it has reached: on my reading list, cited in one of my papers, read, written by me, or published by me. A cited paper I later read moves up to read. An entry is counted once in every field it is tagged with, at that one layer, and nowhere else.

The land

Each field is a mesa built from its own counts alone. Its terraces are the five layers, lowest to highest, and each step is as wide as the logarithm of the number of entries at that layer. The reading list is drawn under water, as a pale shelf, because a list of intentions is not evidence. Projects I shipped stand with posts on the written terrace; papers and patents make the summit. Nothing is drawn on a terrace for a single work: open a field and its works are listed beside the map, one list per layer.

Ridges and arches

Each field keeps its whole stack. Where two fields share entries at a layer, the terraces of that layer flow together in a ridge, as wide as the shared fraction of the smaller field’s entries there, and nowhere else. A joint paper with no shared reading is therefore an arch: the summits are joined and the rock opens beneath. Sharing at several layers stacks into a wall, and a layer that is not shared leaves a window in it. A shared item is counted once in each field it belongs to; the ridge marks it as one item, not two. Shares too thin to draw are listed under the field instead.

Fields that share entries sit shore to shore; fields that share nothing sit apart. No span means no shared entry in the ledger, not that the fields are unrelated. The length of a ridge means nothing; it is set by where the fields sit. Positions are fixed once and never move; only the shapes change as the ledger grows.

What is left out

Citation counts, venues as a measure of worth, and any rating of my own. Titles on the reading layers are counted but not listed. Work I cannot show publicly is counted in the shape but carries no link.