Affinity Time introduces a new vocabulary for perceiving and understanding temporal experience. Like all emerging frameworks, it depends on stabilizing its concepts into a shared language. This lexicon gathers the core terms, axes, metaphors, and models that structure the Affinity Time framework. It is both a glossary for readers and a scaffolding for future development, ensuring that Affinity Time remains consistent, communicable, and recognizable as an original contribution.
A living glossary of terms that anchor and expand the Affinity Time framework. This lexicon collects the conceptual vocabulary, mathematical scaffolding, metaphors, and phenomenological anchors needed to navigate the multidimensional model of time.
Core Axes of Affinity Time
Affinity Time is organized around three principal axes, each shaping how historical experience is folded, compressed, or expanded.
- Constellational Axis (c) → Measures how strongly events, artifacts, or perceptions are linked across otherwise separate times.
- Memory Intensity (m) → Captures how vividly a moment, artifact, or event is remembered, perceived, or reconstructed.
- Frequency (h) → Reflects the density of artifacts or signals within a given stratum or context.
These axes interact dynamically: high constellational linkage with strong memory intensity produces bright folds, while low frequency with faint memory may yield ghost layers.
Affinity Time
A multidimensional framework for perceiving time, compressing and folding historical experience through the axes of m, c, and h. Affinity Time unites archaeology, phenomenology, and philosophy of time into a coherent schema.
Affinity
A perceptual and material bond between artifacts, observers, and events. Affinities function as connective tissue across time — the “gravity” pulling disparate nodes together in compressed folds.
Constellational Axis (c)
A dimension that measures how strongly events, artifacts, or perceptions are linked across otherwise separate times. Like stars in a constellation, discrete points are seen as belonging to a single figure or pattern.
- Example: A 19th-century miner’s tin can and a 21st-century camper’s aluminum soda can might be constellationally linked through shared use of metal food containers.
Memory Intensity (m)
A phenomenological axis gauging how vividly a moment, artifact, or event is remembered, perceived, or reconstructed.
- Measured through scales (e.g., 1–7 Likert ratings).
- Strong memories act like bright beacons; faint ones dissolve into the periphery.
Frequency (h)
The archaeological density of objects or signals within a layer or stratum. High frequency thickens the temporal field, increasing the likelihood of folds.
- Formula: h=artifactsm2 per stratumh = \frac{\text{artifacts}}{\text{m}^2 \text{ per stratum}}h=m2 per stratumartifacts
Metaphors of Time
Compression / Temporal Fold
When affinities collapse temporal distance, creating curvature in the temporal fabric.
- Example: A worn boot evokes the lived struggle of its wearer.
Decompression / Temporal Dilation
The loosening of affinities where time stretches open, distinctions re-emerge, and history dilates into spaciousness.
Fold–Wave Duality
Folds represent internal compressions (curvature of affinities), while their unrolling manifests as sinusoidal oscillations (waves of temporal dilation). Geometry and rhythm are two faces of the same phenomenon.
Oscillatory Unrolling
The conversion of curved temporal folds into sinusoidal waveforms when affinities release at the network’s boundary.
Fourier Decomposition (Maybe Quandary Connection)
Decomposing waves of temporal dilation into fundamental oscillatory components, potentially revealing categorical rhythms of decision and perception (yes/no/maybe states).
Origami Time
The metaphor of time as foldable paper, creased by affinities and refolded into new proximities.
Portal Effect
The experiential moment when an artifact collapses time so vividly that the past feels co-present in the now.
Frequencies of Life
Ratios of compression, transition, and openness in a shadow map. These rhythms represent lived temporal patterns in daily life.
Analytic & Structural Terms
Temporal Fold
A compression of historical time wherein two or more disparate events are drawn close together in perception or affinity.
Shadow Map
The two-dimensional projection of temporal folds, generated through Affinity Tomography. Shadow maps show which regions of history have been compressed, overlapped, or attenuated.
Ray Set (R)
A bundle of perceptual or analytic rays projected from the observer’s origin through the network of affinities. Each ray accumulates attenuation as it passes nodes and edges.
- Formula:
Attenuation along ray =
Σ(α⋅ri+β⋅ωj)\Sigma ( \alpha \cdot r_i + \beta \cdot \omega_j )Σ(α⋅ri+β⋅ωj)
Pixel Intensity (I)
The output brightness of a tomography pixel: I=exp(−attenuation)I = \exp(-\text{attenuation})I=exp(−attenuation)
Tomography
The technique of reconstructing Affinity Time by passing rays through a graph of nodes (artifacts, observers) and edges (affinities). Inspired by CT scans and network tomography.
- Node radius: proportional to frequency
- Edge opacity: proportional to affinity strength
Solitary Rays
The beams of perception cast by an isolated observer. Subjective folds and biases emerge here. Solitary rays are both generative (new insights) and risky (illusions).
Networked Illuminations
The shared light field of multiple observers whose rays overlap, intersect, and sometimes clash. Truth emerges through interference patterns and collective negotiation.
Emergent Fields
The higher-order temporal atmospheres that arise when constellational linkages, memory intensities, and frequencies co-constitute a shared time experience.
Radical Disruptor
A solitary ray so powerful it warps the entire topology. Innovators, prophets, and liars alike can fracture consensus and bend the network into new folds.
Entanglement (Metaphor vs. Model)
- Metaphor: Borrowed from quantum physics — affinities across time resemble entangled states.
- Model: Operationalized as a shared-use index or co-occurrence probability between artifact classes.
Validation Bands
A rubric for interpreting attenuation strength:
- ≥ 50% → Strong affinity / bright fold
- 10–49% → Medium affinity / partial fold
- < 10% → Weak affinity / negligible fold
Constellational Network
The overall topology of affinities mapped as a graph. Observers occupy barycentric origins from which rays project. Over time, networks evolve like shifting constellations.
Experimental / Poetic Terms
Temporal Explorer
The observer who actively navigates Affinity Time, probing folds and constellations rather than passively receiving them.
Portal Event
A sudden perceptual or material shift that opens a doorway between times, collapsing distances and revealing hidden folds.
Evental Horizon
A perceptual boundary within Affinity Time beyond which events cannot be seen, remembered, or reconstructed. Like the event horizon of a black hole, it marks the threshold where affinity and memory intensity collapse into opacity.
- On one side: folds, affinities, and constellations are still retrievable.
- Beyond it: history dissolves into unknowability, leaving only traces and gravitational pull.
Chronotope
Borrowed from literary theory (Bakhtin), but here extended to Affinity Time: narrative or experiential landscapes where time and space fuse into coherent, perceivable forms.
Liminal Residue
Faint traces at the edges of folds — afterimages, echoes, or ghost-affinities that suggest a fold was almost, but not fully, formed.
Ghost Layer
A stratum of history that remains invisible until lit by an observer’s ray. Ghost layers haunt the edges of perception, demanding attention to overlooked or marginalized times.
Time-Bender
An observer who actively shapes the topology of temporality through perception, memory, and meaning. In Affinity Time, all observers are time-benders, whether or not they are aware of it: their affinities crease, compress, or dilate the temporal fabric. Self-aware time-benders recognize their agency in bending time; networks of time-benders can achieve collective reflexivity, generating emergent folds that alter history as shared experience.
Closing Note
This lexicon is iterative. As Affinity Time expands — into philosophy, physics analogies, archaeological case studies, and data visualizations — the lexicon will expand alongside it.
The Rosita Museum 