Scriptome guide
What is the Scriptome?
The scriptome is Inferpedia's map of the world's manuscript production before print - both what survives and what was lost. Inferpedia mostly infers particular missing things: a lost text, an unnamed scribe. The scriptome infers a quantity: how many manuscripts a region and century produced, of which only a fraction survives. Singular inference and statistical inference are two faces of the same question - what the record implies but no longer contains.
The attested shore
The extant census is the attested shore: catalogue records for known surviving manuscripts, deduplicated and tagged by tradition, region, period, and source where the catalogue allows it. It is the known mainland of the manuscript record, valuable even before any estimate is made from it.
Production estimates start from that shore and reach offshore. They ask how much manuscript production must have existed for the surviving sample to be here now, after loss, uneven cataloguing, survival bias, and uncertain dating. The water on the Scriptome map is therefore not decoration: it is the inferred lost mass around the surviving land.
The plerome relationship
The plerome and the scriptome express the same charter idea at different subject matter. In the plerome, an attested mainland anchors islands of particular inference. In the scriptome, the known manuscript census anchors a quantitative inference: not this lost text or that unnamed scribe, but the scale of manuscript production that no longer survives.
Coverage so far
The live manuscript map has Latin West and Islamic substrate. The broader taxonomy also names Byzantine Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Syriac, Coptic, and Ethiopic traditions, but most of that global map remains terra incognita until catalogue access, region attribution, dating, and survival calibration improve.