Navsuv. The Bi-Weekly Summary

The Bi-Weekly Summary | 24.Nov.-07.Dec.2025

Mediation, Situational Meaning, and the Failure of Extraction

What links a mediation layer between semantic vocabularies, a moss that becomes legible only when wet, a critique of literocentric infrastructures, and the limits of archival logic itself? During these two weeks, the same argument surfaced across four different terrains: meaning is often relational rather than portable, and systems that depend on extraction — whether textual, semantic, or archival — collapse when confronted with forms of knowledge that live only in situation.

In Metadata as Mediation, the "Metadata as Revolt" series advances into its most architectural proposition to date: that responsible interoperability must be built not through assimilation but through governed translation. Instead of forcing community-scale vocabularies into dominant ontologies, the text proposes a connective membrane that documents mappings, disagreements, conditionalities, and refusals. Mediation becomes an ethical space: not a funnel into universality, but an infrastructural acknowledgment that meanings travel only when their boundaries are allowed to remain intact.

From this semantic interstice, the reflection turns toward ecological ones. In the chronicle The Cloud Forest Does Not Archive, high-Andean moss becomes a lesson in epistemic humility. Its hydration states register rain without recording it; they remain interpretable only while the environmental conditions persist. Information lasts only as long as the correlation that generated it. Remove the moss, and the meaning evaporates — not because it was unstable, but because it was relational. This is not metaphor but ontology: some knowledge systems produce legibility only inside the rhythms that sustain them. The forest shows what archival theory tries to forget: that context is not metadata but structure.

That same lesson is refracted analytically in Meaning That Is Lost When Uprooted, where ecological fieldnotes are translated into a critique of archival assumptions. If archives rely on the portability of content, the cloud forest demonstrates cases where portability destroys meaning. The "document" becomes an event rather than a unit, and legibility becomes a configuration rather than a property. To preserve such phenomena would require preserving their conditions of emergence — co-presence, rhythm, humidity, altitude — an impossibility for record-oriented infrastructures. The post makes the conclusion unavoidable: extraction is not a neutral operation; it is a transformation.

Finally, The Page Cannot Hold the Dance closes the "Dealing with Literocentrism" series by extending the critique into the architecture of memory institutions. Libraries that center writing inevitably treat embodied, oral, and transient forms of knowledge as deviations to be captured, stabilized, or transcribed. But to "diversify" collections without redesigning the underlying systems is to reinforce the same literate supremacy. The note calls for infrastructures that do not translate movement into text, or presence into document, or voice into transcript as the price of legitimacy. The page, it argues, has done valuable work, but it cannot hold everything.

Across these works, a single proposition crystallizes: not all knowledge survives uprooting. Semantic systems need mediation rather than hierarchy; ecological processes require immersion rather than capture; archives must recognize when meaning depends on conditions they cannot reproduce; libraries must uncenter the page to allow other temporalities and forms of presence to exist without distortion. The thread running through these texts is not opposition to preservation, interoperability, or documentation. It is a reminder that continuity is not always achieved through stasis, and that some forms of memory endure only through relation.

Navsuv offers a biweekly synthesis of my work: blog posts, critical notes, articles, archival documents, and other materials. It's not just a summary — it's an editorial thread tracing how each piece fits into a shifting landscape of memory, critique, and resistance.

The name comes from the language of the Sivdara, a fictional people from a broader personal project I'm developing: a continent imagined as a space to explore knowledge, memory, and the tension between presence and erasure. In their tongue, navsuv names the rope-and-straw suspension bridges used to cross the naroow valleys, up in the mountains — ephemeral yet enduring paths stretched between worlds. Like this section.