Okay, so I’ve topped up my AI subscriptions for the month, and got Muse to shoot out a kind of coherent statement about what happens after the SYMBOL SCAN skill explained earlier, in relation to my AI Lorecore books.

Basically, what happens is that once books are converted and scanned, the process pulls out working narrative units, “symbols,” which taken together with their metadata form a “registry” which Muse explains adequately in the passage below:

The registry is a catalog of everything that matters across the books. Its basic unit is the symbol: a person, place, object, group, or idea worth tracking. Each entry holds the symbol’s name, the passages where it shows up, and the other symbols it connects to, all backed by quotes from the text. It can be read in both directions — look up what the copper bit is, or look up which symbols appear in book 12.

It gets built by a process called the symbol scan. Each book is converted from its EPUB into plain text, which is faster to search and lets every finding point back to an exact passage. The scan reads through and proposes candidates: a name, where it appears, a quote showing it in context. Nothing enters on its own. Every candidate lands on an approval sheet — a simple checklist — where each one is looked at and either approved or skipped. Approved symbols become entries.

The links between symbols go through the same review. When two symbols keep appearing together, the scan proposes a connection; when two names turn out to be the same thing, it proposes a merge. Each proposal is either promoted or skipped, and the decision is written down permanently, so the system keeps a record of what has been decided. When later books are scanned, sightings of known symbols are added to their existing entries, and only genuinely new material goes through review.

Once the registry exists, it can be sliced — a subset of entries pulled out for a particular job — and entries can be linked together in new ways. The catalog is the raw material; a slice is the working set.

We’ll get into later how registry slices can be used, and talk about the mechanics of using and re-using symbol registry entries…