The CTL Glossary

Every house term, defined once — so newcomers never have to guess what a page means.

Black cultural intelligence

The practice of documenting, grading, and citing Black cultural life with institutional rigor — through the lenses of history, athletics, music, and technology. The full explainer.

Lens

One of CTL’s four perspectives: history, athletics, music, technology. Every project looks through one or more of them.

Flagship

A deep-research package (ID scheme CTL-DR-*) — months of research rendered as an interactive page. CTL’s research program carries fourteen flagships, from Black Chicago’s institutions to the Black Memory Emergency.

Brief

A short research publication — one finding, fully cited. Twenty-five live at the briefs shelf.

Dossier

A deep file on a single subject — every claim graded, every source named. Eight published, including the Marcus Freeman dossier (CTL-RD-PER-000002): 56 claims, 18 VERIFIED.

CTL 10 / the CultureTechLens Index

The monthly, data-driven ranking of cultural resonance — scores from public attention, CTL evidence depth, and momentum, under methodology CTL-IDX-001 v1.1. The Index hub.

Evidence grade

One of five labels — VERIFIED, SUPPORTED, PROVISIONAL, DISPUTED, UNRESOLVED — describing the strength of evidence behind a claim. How to read them.

Clear Ear Award

CTL’s annual music honor: a 25-album shortlist, each record reviewed against its own lane, a winner named every December. The shortlist.

Knowledge graph

The machine-readable archive: 1,441 entities — people, places, institutions, events — with claims, evidence grades, and relationships. Browse it; query it.

Working paper

An open-access research paper, deposited on Zenodo under CC BY 4.0 and citable by DOI. CTL has deposited four: the Index edition and three papers on Black memory, Black media infrastructure, and Black technology.

DOI

Digital Object Identifier — a permanent link for a publication. CTL’s deposits: 10.5281/zenodo.23081630 (Index), 10.5281/zenodo.23173585, 10.5281/zenodo.23173917, 10.5281/zenodo.23173962.

Deep Research (DR)

CTL’s research program and ID scheme — e.g. CTL-DR-PRESERVE-001, the Black Memory Emergency corpus (84 collections, 119 entities, 70 events, 304 sources).

Entity

A person, place, institution, or event in the knowledge graph, carrying an ID like CTL-E-1000.

Claim

A single checkable fact. Every claim carries an evidence grade and at least one source.

Corpus

The body of sources behind a project — for example, the 304 sources mapped for the Memory Emergency.

Red team

CTL’s adversarial review pass: every flagship is attacked for errors, thin sourcing, and overclaiming before publication, and the corrections are applied on the record.

CTL

Short for CultureTechLens.

CULTURETECHLENS NFP

The legal entity — an Illinois 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 39-3143901. Verification.

New here? Start at Start here, or read what Black cultural intelligence is.

Source: CultureTechLens