Contextual Concordance

The Contextual Concordance is the running register, maintained in the Third Scriptorium, of every subject whose contextual placement has been formally disputed and resolved at least once. It is not to be confused with the numbered Concordances themselves, though its name derives from the same root and its compilers have spent four centuries insisting on the distinction. Where the numbered Concordances are instruments of governance, the Contextual Concordance is a record of precedent: a single entry per subject, arranged not by the date of the dispute but by the date on which the subject was first catalogued, so that a matter resolved in 2,014 may appear beneath one resolved in 1,190.

As of the most recent collation, the register holds 411,000 entries across 62 folio volumes. The 63rd volume remains open and is kept chained at the Scriptorium's eastern lectern.

Origin and the problem of the two registers

The Contextual Concordance was established by the Seventeenth Concordance in the same instrument that created the Bureau of Contextual Reconciliation, and the two bodies have never fully agreed on which of them owns the register. The Bureau maintains that the Concordance is its property, since the Seventeenth Concordance tasks it with "reconciling contextual claims for archival placement," and a record of reconciled placements would appear to fall within that charge. The Scriptorium's clerks maintain that the register predates the Bureau by three years and was merely ratified by the Seventeenth. The Directorate of Contextual Reconciliation has declined to rule on the question, noting in a circular of 1,188 that both offices perform the same work and that the ruling would therefore change nothing.

In practice the Scriptorium writes the entries and the Bureau seals them. The seal is applied at the foot of the folio, in the margin, and any entry lacking it is treated as provisional by the Division of Contextual Anchoring when it reviews failed Contextual Verifications.

Method of entry

An entry is made only after a dispute has been resolved by the application of the Principle of Contextual Primacy, which holds that a subject's context is determined by its first correct placement rather than its most recent. The clerk enters the subject's customary name, the floor of first placement, the resolving instrument, and a one-line summary of the point at issue. The summary is limited to forty words. Clerks who exceed forty words have their entries struck and rewritten; the Scriptorium's standing instruction on this point is stated flatly in its house rules: "Brevity is not a virtue here. It is a requirement, and it is checked."

The register is not a finding aid. A reader who consults the Contextual Concordance to learn where a subject is shelved will find the floor recorded and will find that the floor has usually been reassigned since. The Concordance records the reasoning, not the shelf.

Dispute with the Manual of Contextual Metrics

The most durable scholarly disagreement concerning the register is whether its entries constitute contextual density as defined in Seventh Concordance, Revision 4, or merely a tally of resolved cases. The Manual of Contextual Metrics defines Contextual Integrity in Schedule 2 in terms of "unbroken contextual provenance," and the Metricists of the Fourth Alcove argue that an entry in the Concordance, being an acknowledgement of past rupture, cannot contribute to integrity and may even reduce it.

The Scriptorium's position is the opposite. Its Chief Compiler, Halloran Vey, argued in a memorandum of 1,410 that a resolved dispute is the strongest evidence of provenance available, because it has been tested. The memorandum is appended to the open volume and is widely quoted.

"A subject that has never been disputed is a subject no one has troubled to examine. We do not record its integrity. We record our ignorance of it."

— Halloran Vey, Memorandum to the Third Scriptorium, 1,410

The Bureau of Contextual Reconciliation has not endorsed either position. It has, however, twice declined to strike Vey's memorandum from the register, which the Metricists regard as an endorsement in all but name.

The Albrec grievance

In the winter of 1,433, a clerk of the Third Scriptorium named Perrin Albrec was assigned to collate the entries for Floor 8,099, a floor whose contextual triage had been the subject of a long-running contention between Seventh Concordance, Revision 4 and Concordance 44. Albrec found that the same subject had been entered twice, once under the triage rule and once under the isolation rule, and that both entries bore the Bureau's seal. Rather than strike one, he appended a note reading "both" and initialled it.

The note was discovered nine months later during a routine audit. The Division of Contextual Anchoring ruled that a concordance cannot contain two placements for one subject and ordered Albrec's note struck, with the entries merged under the triage rule. The merge was performed, but the striking was refused by the Scriptorium on the grounds that the note was not an entry and had never been sealed. Albrec was reprimanded, promoted to the collation of Volume 61, and thereafter initialled nothing.

The merged entries remain visible in the 61st volume as a faint double impression, and readers consulting them are asked not to press on the paper.

Relationship to the practice of harmonization

The Contextual Concordance is a required antecedent to Contextual Harmonization. No subject may be harmonized at Tier VII or above unless its placement is recorded in the register, a requirement imposed by the School of Contextual Propagation when it took joint administration of the upper tiers with the Division of Contextual Anchoring. The reasoning, stated in the School's petition of 1,377, is that harmonization restores a subject to the context it was meant to occupy, and the Concordance is the only record of what that context was meant to be.

This has produced a practical difficulty. Subjects that have never been disputed are not in the register, and cannot be harmonized, and therefore cannot be corrected. The Scriptorium's answer, offered whenever the matter is raised, is that such subjects do not need correction. The Contextual Purists have never accepted this, and Contextual Reading has been proposed in the register as a partial remedy. The proposal sits in the open volume, unsealed, awaiting the Bureau.