Research tools
Connection Mapping guides.connection-mapping.hero.title_accent
The connections you'd eventually notice yourself — surfaced now, as a graph you can actually see. It finds where your materials speak to each other, and tells you how strongly.
When to reach for it
Once you have more than a handful of materials in a project and can no longer hold the whole thing in your head. This is the moment a show's real structure starts to emerge — the recurring artist, the shared source, the argument two catalogues are quietly having. Mapping makes those visible before you've committed to a thesis.
Choose your scope
Map a few materials you're actively thinking about, or turn it loose on the whole library to see the shape of everything at once. It works on what's already indexed, so newly uploaded sources join the map once they've processed.
Choosing which materials to map
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Read the graph
Materials appear as nodes; a line between two means they're conceptually related, scored by how close they actually are. Thicker, darker edges are stronger connections. You're not reading text here — you're reading structure. The clusters are your emerging themes; the lone nodes are the outliers worth a second look.
The connection graph with weighted edges
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Every edge carries a short note on why the two materials connect — not just that they do. Hover to read the reasoning before you trust it.
Filter by strength
A busy library produces a busy graph. Filter to strong or very-strong connections to cut the noise and see only the relationships worth building on. The weak ties are still there when you want them — sometimes the faint connection is the interesting one — but strong-only is the right default for finding a spine.
Filtering the graph by connection strength
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Follow the timeline and the names
Alongside the graph, materials are laid out on a timeline, and the artists, movements, and institutions that recur across your sources are pulled out as their own entities. This is where a chronology or a through-line you hadn't planned quietly announces itself.
Timeline and extracted entities
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What it will — and won’t — do
It measures conceptual proximity and shows you the map. It won't tell you which cluster is your exhibition — that judgment, the leap from a set of related materials to a genuine argument, is the curatorial work, and it stays with you. The map just means you're making that call with the whole field in view rather than from memory.
Mapping a project costs roughly 3,000 tokens — a few cents. The graph is cached, so re-opening it is free until your materials change.
What comes next
From the map to the argument
Semantic Search
3 minFind materials by meaning, not keywords — ask questions in natural language
Research Synthesis
5 minGenerate structured data matrices across multiple sources — exportable to CSV/JSON
Comparative Analysis
5 minSide-by-side source comparison with contradiction scoring and common ground detection
See the shape
of your research.
Upload a few sources and watch the connections appear. Curatorial is free to start.
Try it free