elephants

Elephants do not forget.

Sourced timelines of things that are easier to remember one at a time than side by side. One folder per subject; each folder is a self-contained page published to GitHub Pages.

Published at elephants.debedb.com.

Subject	Page
covid19/	COVID-19, 2020 — elephants.debedb.com/covid19/

Ethos

We have a position. We state it, we publish the case against it, and we do not smuggle it into anything else.

That is the whole method. Having a point of view is not the problem; pretending not to have one is. So each page does three things in the open:

1. States its argument in its own section, in plain words. An argument you have to infer from a layout is an argument that cannot be attacked. Ours is written down under a heading that says it is ours.
2. Publishes the strongest objections to itself, written to land rather than to be knocked down. If the argument loses, we expect it to lose on one of the objections we printed ourselves. An event that cuts against the argument is more valuable to the page than one that supports it, and gets added on the same terms.
3. Keeps our voice out of everything else. It appears in exactly two places: which events share an axis, and the lines explicitly marked "our call". Everywhere else the page reports what a source says and attributes it.

This is the difference between arguing and opinionating. We are not telling you what to think about these documents; we are putting them where you can read them in an order we chose, saying why we chose it, and handing you the argument against.

Everything below the argument is not ours, and we never claim it is:

• We never say "this is ours." We say "this is what we found." No entry rests on our own assertion. Every claim on a page is a link to somebody else's document, named, dated and attributed. If we are the only source for something, it does not go on the page.
• Provenance is visible without clicking. The citation sits on the row, in the open. A visualization where you have to hover to find out who says so is a visualization asking to be trusted, and we would rather be checked.
• Sources are labelled by what they are. primary is the instrument, order, letter or study itself. reporting is a journalist's account, used only where no primary document exists. no document means no instrument was ever published — stated plainly, never papered over with news coverage dressed up as a record.
• Our judgment calls are printed next to the thing they affect. Where a source left a date ambiguous, or a superlative depends on which definition you pick, the row carries an explicit "our call" line. The reader can disagree with the call without having to reverse-engineer it.
• We name what we could not verify. "We looked for a signed order and did not find one" is a finding, and it is published as one.
• A dead link or a wrong citation is a bug, and is as welcome as any other bug. So is "your framing is wrong" — that is a bug report about the only part of the page we actually wrote.
• Disagreement takes the form of a change, not a comment. There is no comment section and no editor to get past: correct the file and send the correction (a pull request), and we either accept it in public or say in public why not. If you'd rather not argue with us at all, take a complete copy and publish your own version (a fork) — different events, different conclusion, no permission needed. That is not the argument failing; it is the argument working, because then two versions exist and both can be checked against the same documents. Send us yours and it gets linked from here.

The vertical axis of these charts carries no magnitude and no ranking. It exists only so that every document has somewhere to sit where you can see and click its citation. Time is the only real axis.

House rules

• No build step. Each page is one self-contained HTML file: open it, or serve the folder. The data is a plain array at the top of the file, one entry per document.
• Link to the primary document, not to reporting about it, wherever a primary document exists. Reporting is labelled as such and demoted.
• Colour is a grouping we chose, so the page says that next to the legend.

Default branch is master.

The site is served from its own subdomain rather than debedb.github.io/elephants/ because the user site's domain (www.debedb.com) has a wedged Let's Encrypt authorization, so every project repo that inherits it is HTTP-only. A fresh subdomain gets a clean certificate in seconds.