John Swygert
September 13, 2026
Ivory Tower Publishing
Abstract
Modern creators rarely leave behind a single coherent archive. Their work accumulates across decades, platforms, usernames, websites, social networks, music services, publishing systems, blogs, cloud repositories, academic databases, video platforms, image hosts, abandoned accounts, and services that may eventually disappear.
As a result, a creator may possess a substantial lifetime body of work while having no complete record of where that work resides, which version is authoritative, when it was first created, how later versions evolved, or how different works relate to one another.
This paper proposes Secretary Suite Corpus Reconstruction, a system for discovering, identifying, organizing, and reconstructing a creator’s cumulative body of work across distributed digital environments.
The system would not require creators to remove their work from existing platforms or consolidate every artifact physically into one centralized repository. Instead, it would establish a canonical relational record of the creator’s work: what exists, where it exists, when it appeared, how versions relate, who participated in its creation, and which artifact should be regarded as authoritative.
The central principle is:
Do not centralize the work. Centralize knowledge of the work.
Corpus Reconstruction would complement Secretary Suite’s proposed Genesis View, which records provenance during future creation. Genesis View provides forward provenance; Corpus Reconstruction provides backward provenance. Together, they could form a continuous historical record of a creator’s intellectual and creative life.
01 Introduction
The internet promised permanence.
In practice, it often produced fragmentation.
A person who has written, recorded, published, photographed, programmed, researched, performed, or created online for twenty or thirty years may discover that their work is scattered across dozens of systems.
A poem may exist on an old Blogger account.
Its musical adaptation may exist on SoundClick.
Another recording may appear on ReverbNation.
Its lyrics may have been copied to a lyric archive.
A newer version may exist on Suno.
A derivative version may exist on another AI music platform.
The creator may later quote the same poem in a book, publish the book through Amazon, discuss the work on a personal website, and upload an archival copy elsewhere.
All of those artifacts may belong to the same creative lineage.
Yet no system recognizes the lineage as a whole.
Search engines locate pages.
Platforms organize accounts.
Libraries catalog publications.
Music databases catalog recordings.
Academic systems identify papers.
Cloud drives store files.
None of them necessarily reconstruct the creator’s complete body of work as a connected historical structure.
Secretary Suite Corpus Reconstruction is intended to solve that problem.
02 The Fragmented Creator Problem
Digital fragmentation occurs naturally because creation happens over time.
A person rarely chooses every platform they will ever use at the beginning of their career.
Platforms rise and disappear.
Technologies change.
Names change.
Creative identities evolve.
A musician may publish under several project names.
A researcher may publish under a legal name.
A novelist may use another byline.
A visual artist may use a pseudonym.
Early work may reside on services that are barely maintained.
Later work may appear on entirely different systems.
The result is not merely inconvenience.
It is a loss of structure.
A creator may eventually be unable to answer basic questions about their own work:
What have I created?
Where is it?
When did I create it?
What was the original version?
Which versions came later?
Which works are related?
Which pieces were entirely mine?
Which were collaborations?
Which involved artificial intelligence?
Which were adaptations?
Which have disappeared?
Which still survive only because someone else copied them?
These are provenance questions.
They are also archival questions.
And increasingly, they are questions of personal intellectual history.
03 Search Is Not an Archive
Search engines are extraordinarily useful, but searchability and preservation are not the same thing.
A work can remain online while effectively becoming lost.
Its page may no longer rank.
Its title may be common.
The author’s username may have changed.
The hosting service may block indexing.
The content may load dynamically.
A platform may expose titles while hiding lyrics from external crawlers.
Metadata may be incomplete.
Search results may favor popular newer pages rather than historically important older ones.
A creator searching for their own work may therefore receive only a distorted sample of what exists.
The internet can contain a work without making that work meaningfully discoverable.
This leads to an important distinction:
Existence is not discoverability, and discoverability is not preservation.
Corpus Reconstruction would treat search engines as discovery instruments rather than authoritative archives.
04 The Distributed Creator Archive
Secretary Suite would create what may be called a Distributed Creator Archive.
The archive would not necessarily store every object itself.
Instead, it would maintain a structured representation of the creator’s complete corpus.
A canonical record might contain:
Work
Creator or creators
Creation date
First known publication date
Original title
Alternate titles
Creative identity or username
Medium
Source platform
Canonical source
Known copies
Versions
Derivatives
Collaborators
AI involvement
Copyright or licensing information
Publication identifiers
URLs
Archived URLs
Files
Relationship to other works
Confidence level
Provenance evidence
This transforms scattered web artifacts into a coherent intellectual map.
05 Discovery Across Platforms
Corpus Reconstruction would begin with a creator seed profile.
The creator might provide:
their legal name,
pen names,
artist names,
usernames,
websites,
known accounts,
email addresses used publicly,
publication titles,
music project names,
research identifiers,
and representative works.
From those seeds, Secretary Suite could progressively discover additional material.
Sources might include:
personal websites,
blogs,
music services,
publishing platforms,
academic repositories,
video platforms,
podcast platforms,
photo services,
social networks,
code repositories,
Internet Archive records,
book databases,
lyric databases,
public cloud documents,
digital magazines,
interviews,
press mentions,
conference material,
and public search indexes.
Discovery would be recursive.
Finding an old username might reveal another account.
An album page might expose song titles.
Song titles might reveal lyric mirrors.
A book may contain the title of an older essay.
An archived webpage may expose a previously unknown domain.
The system would therefore perform not merely web search but relational discovery.
06 Identity Resolution
One of the hardest problems is determining whether two artifacts actually belong to the same creator.
Names alone are insufficient.
Two people may share a name.
A creator may use several names.
A username may be reused by someone else.
Corpus Reconstruction would therefore use multiple signals.
These might include:
matching biography,
matching linked websites,
cross-linked accounts,
identical or similar text,
publication metadata,
email references,
copyright statements,
embedded usernames,
shared images,
known geographical references,
dates,
audio fingerprints,
writing style,
file metadata,
and explicit creator confirmation.
The system should never quietly convert uncertainty into fact.
Each attribution could carry a confidence level such as:
Confirmed
Highly probable
Probable
Possible
Rejected
This preserves uncertainty rather than hiding it.
07 Canonical Works and Distributed Instances
A critical distinction must be made between a work and an instance of a work.
A poem is a work.
Its appearance on a blog is one instance.
Its publication in a book is another.
Its conversion into a song is another.
Its reproduction on a lyric website is another.
Its revised form may constitute another version of the same underlying work.
Secretary Suite should therefore avoid treating every URL as a separate creative object.
Instead:
\[ W \rightarrow \{I_1,I_2,I_3,\ldots,I_n\} \]
where \(W\) represents the canonical work and each \(I\) represents an observed instance.
This simple distinction would eliminate enormous duplication.
08 Version Reconstruction
Many works evolve.
A poem may begin as handwritten notes.
It may be posted online.
It may later be revised.
A musical version may change punctuation or wording.
A book edition may restore earlier language.
An AI-assisted adaptation may add new material.
Secretary Suite could reconstruct a version graph rather than forcing everything into one linear list.
For example:
\[ V_1 \rightarrow V_2 \rightarrow V_3 \]
but sometimes:
\[ V_1 \rightarrow \begin{cases} V_{2a}\\ V_{2b}\\ V_{2c} \end{cases} \]
where several derivative versions branch from the same source.
The creator could designate one version as authoritative while preserving all others historically.
09 Authorship Classification
Modern creative provenance requires more than the traditional categories of “author” and “not author.”
Works may involve:
solo authorship,
co-authorship,
editing assistance,
translation,
musical adaptation,
performance,
sampling,
AI-assisted ideation,
AI-assisted editing,
AI-generated passages,
human-directed AI generation,
or substantial human-AI collaboration.
Corpus Reconstruction should explicitly preserve those distinctions.
A useful classification might include:
Human-authored
Human-authored with editorial assistance
Human collaboration
Human-authored / AI-edited
Human-directed AI collaboration
AI-generated with human curation
Derivative adaptation
Authorship uncertain
This becomes particularly important as AI-generated and AI-assisted material proliferates.
Future readers should be able to distinguish a poem written entirely by a person from a piece created through extensive machine collaboration.
10 Duplicate Detection
Creators frequently repost the same work.
A lyric may appear on five websites.
A paper may exist as a PDF, HTML article, repository upload, and revised edition.
Secretary Suite should identify probable duplicates using:
text similarity,
title similarity,
semantic similarity,
audio fingerprints,
image hashes,
file checksums,
publication metadata,
and structural comparison.
Duplicates should not simply be deleted from the historical record.
Their existence may itself be important.
Instead, they should be clustered beneath the canonical work.
Thus:
One work
may have
many surviving witnesses.
That concept is similar to textual scholarship, where multiple historical manuscripts preserve different witnesses to the same underlying text.
11 Missing Works
One of the most valuable capabilities would be identifying work that appears to have existed but can no longer be located.
Suppose an old album listing contains twelve songs but only eleven survive.
Suppose a blog post references a poem that is absent from the archive.
Suppose another page quotes a passage from an apparently missing essay.
Secretary Suite could create a record:
Known missing work
with supporting evidence.
A creator could then search old drives, backups, emails, notebooks, or physical media.
In this way, Corpus Reconstruction would not merely catalogue surviving works.
It could help recover lost ones.
12 Archival Resilience
The system should preserve more than URLs.
URLs die.
Platforms disappear.
Accounts are deleted.
Domains expire.
Where legally and technically permitted, Secretary Suite could preserve:
metadata,
checksums,
screenshots,
textual copies,
local archival copies,
web archive references,
publication identifiers,
and timestamps.
This creates redundancy.
The goal should not be unnecessary duplication of the entire internet.
The goal should be sufficient evidence to establish what existed and where.
13 Creator Confirmation
Automated reconstruction should remain subject to creator review.
Secretary Suite might present candidate discoveries:
Is this yours?
Is this the original version?
Was this written alone or collaboratively?
Should these two records be merged?
Is this title an alternate title?
Did this song originate as this poem?
The creator’s answers become provenance data.
This creates something search engines cannot produce:
an archive informed directly by the living creator.
14 The Canonical Home
The result would be a personal corpus dashboard.
A creator might see:
Books — 143
Research papers — 218
Poems — 176
Songs — 312
Visual works — 94
Essays — 471
Videos — 53
Unresolved discoveries — 27
Probable duplicates — 63
Missing referenced works — 8
Those numbers are illustrative.
Selecting a category would reveal the full relational archive.
The creator could search across their own lifetime body of work regardless of where each artifact physically resides.
This becomes the creator’s canonical home without necessarily becoming the creator’s sole storage location.
15 Preserve Distribution
Centralization introduces its own dangers.
A centralized archive can fail.
A company can disappear.
A database can become corrupted.
An account can be lost.
A creator can lose access.
Distributed copies therefore have preservation value.
Secretary Suite should not encourage creators to remove work from the wider internet merely because it has been indexed internally.
Instead:
Preserve distribution while unifying knowledge.
The blog remains.
The song remains on the music service.
The paper remains in the repository.
The book remains with its publisher.
Secretary Suite records their relationships.
16 Corpus Reconstruction and Genesis View
Corpus Reconstruction fits naturally beside Secretary Suite’s proposed Genesis View.
Genesis View records the development of new work as it happens.
It may preserve:
drafts,
edits,
rejected ideas,
AI suggestions,
source additions,
structural changes,
decision points,
timestamps,
creator identity,
machine-readable provenance,
and successive versions.
Corpus Reconstruction performs the opposite temporal task.
It investigates the past.
Thus:
\[ \text{Corpus Reconstruction} = \text{Backward Provenance} \] \[ \text{Genesis View} = \text{Forward Provenance} \]
Together:
\[ \text{Creative History} = \text{Backward Provenance} + \text{Forward Provenance} \]
A creator adopting Secretary Suite late in life could reconstruct decades of earlier work and then record future creation continuously from that point forward.
Eventually, the two records would form a nearly uninterrupted creative chronology.
17 Creative Lineage
The archive should also recognize that works influence later works.
A poem may become a song.
The song may inspire a story.
The story may become part of a novel.
The novel may generate a research question.
A research paper may later reshape another book.
Traditional file systems rarely preserve these relationships.
Secretary Suite could.
For example:
\[ P_1 \rightarrow S_1 \rightarrow B_1 \rightarrow R_1 \]
where:
\(P_1\) = poem,
\(S_1\) = song,
\(B_1\) = book,
\(R_1\) = research work.
This is not merely metadata.
It is creative genealogy.
18 The Creator as a Relational System
A lifetime body of work should not be understood merely as a pile of files.
It is a relational system.
Ideas recur.
Themes develop.
Language changes.
Concepts migrate between media.
Certain works become turning points.
Some early ideas disappear and later return.
Others produce entire families of subsequent work.
A sufficiently rich Corpus Reconstruction system could eventually reveal patterns the creator themselves had never recognized.
It might show:
when a recurring concept first appeared,
how frequently certain themes returned,
how vocabulary changed,
which early works anticipated later research,
how artistic and scientific work influenced one another,
or which periods produced the greatest creative branching.
Thus the archive becomes not only preservational but analytical.
19 Creator-Controlled AI Analysis
Once a corpus has been reconstructed, artificial intelligence could work across the creator’s entire body of work.
The creator might ask:
Find every poem involving mortality.
Show everything I wrote about consciousness before 2018.
Which of my songs began as poems?
Find ideas in my early writing that later appeared in my research.
Which works exist online but have never been formally published?
Find every work that mentions Cumberland.
Which poems are strong enough for a selected collection?
Show every known version of this lyric.
Such questions become possible because the AI is no longer searching isolated files.
It is operating over a reconstructed creative corpus.
20 Public and Private Layers
Not every artifact should automatically become public.
A creator may want Secretary Suite to recognize:
public work,
private drafts,
unpublished manuscripts,
personal notes,
restricted collaborations,
embargoed research,
or family archives.
Corpus Reconstruction should therefore support multiple visibility layers.
A creator could have:
Public Corpus
Private Corpus
Collaborative Corpus
Restricted Archive
Posthumous Archive
The creator could decide what others may see.
21 Posthumous Stewardship
The long-term value may become greatest after the creator is gone.
Families frequently inherit computers, notebooks, cloud accounts, websites, recordings, and manuscripts without understanding their relationships.
Digital work can disappear rapidly when subscriptions lapse or accounts become inaccessible.
A reconstructed corpus could serve as an intellectual estate map.
Future editors, researchers, family members, historians, and AI systems could determine:
what exists,
where it came from,
which version matters,
how works relate,
and what the creator intended.
This transforms Secretary Suite from a productivity tool into a potential cultural preservation system.
22 Machine-Readable Provenance
Every canonical record should be machine-readable.
A future provenance record might contain:
creator identifier,
work identifier,
creation timestamp,
publication timestamps,
version relationships,
platform identifiers,
cryptographic hashes,
authorship classification,
AI participation,
source evidence,
license,
archive locations,
and confidence scores.
This could allow a future system to reconstruct the archive even if Secretary Suite itself no longer existed.
Longevity therefore requires that the archive not depend exclusively upon proprietary software.
The data should be exportable into open, documented structures.
23 The Importance of Time
Corpus Reconstruction should preserve time as carefully as content.
Whenever possible, records should distinguish:
creation date,
first publication date,
revision date,
upload date,
rediscovery date,
and archival capture date.
These are not interchangeable.
A poem written in 2003 but uploaded in 2011 should not be represented as having originated in 2011.
When the exact date is unknown, uncertainty should be explicit.
Examples:
2003
circa 2003
before March 2004
date unknown; first surviving appearance 2011
That is more intellectually honest than inventing precision.
24 Evidence Rather Than Assumption
Corpus Reconstruction should operate as an evidentiary system.
For every conclusion, it should be possible to ask:
Why does Secretary Suite believe this?
The answer might include:
matching text,
creator confirmation,
archived page,
copyright statement,
publication record,
cross-link,
file metadata,
or another documented source.
Provenance without evidence becomes mythology.
The system should therefore preserve the path by which each attribution was made.
25 A Practical Example
Imagine a creator who has worked online for thirty years.
Secretary Suite begins with three known identities.
It discovers five websites.
Those websites reveal seven additional usernames.
Those usernames reveal music accounts, archived blogs, published books, essays, lyrics, photographs, and interviews.
A music platform reveals 150 song titles.
A blog contains original lyrics to 110 of them.
A lyric site preserves twelve pieces whose original pages have disappeared.
An archived website exposes twenty earlier poems.
A book contains revised versions of eight.
Three songs appear to originate from one poem.
Several AI-assisted adaptations appear decades later.
Instead of hundreds of disconnected pages, Secretary Suite produces one relational structure.
The creator can finally see their own life’s work as a whole.
26 Beyond Individual Creators
Although conceived around individual creators, the same architecture could support:
scientists,
research laboratories,
artists,
bands,
authors,
filmmakers,
inventors,
companies,
families,
historical societies,
universities,
and cultural institutions.
A laboratory could reconstruct decades of research lineage.
A band could rebuild its complete recording history.
A family could organize generations of photographs and documents.
A university could trace the intellectual development of a major researcher.
The underlying problem is the same:
distributed artifacts lacking a unified relational history.
27 Ethical Constraints
A system capable of broad internet discovery must include strict ethical boundaries.
It should distinguish between:
publicly available material,
creator-authorized connected accounts,
private information,
and third-party material.
It should not treat discoverability as permission for unlimited reuse.
Copyright must remain with the rights holder.
Private material should require authorization.
Uncertain identity matches should remain uncertain.
Sensitive information should not be automatically exposed.
Corpus Reconstruction should organize a creator’s work, not become a mechanism for surveillance.
28 The Larger Idea
Human civilization is producing unprecedented quantities of digital creative material.
Yet much of it is structurally fragile.
The individual artifact may survive while its context disappears.
The author may survive while authorship becomes uncertain.
Copies may proliferate while the original becomes impossible to identify.
Future preservation therefore requires more than storing files.
It requires preserving relationships.
Who created this?
When?
From what?
Where was it first published?
What came before it?
What came after?
What did it become?
What version did the creator consider definitive?
Those relationships are part of the work.
29 Conclusion
A person’s creative life increasingly exists as a distributed network rather than a collection stored in one place.
That network may span decades, technologies, companies, identities, media types, and generations of software.
Today, creators are largely responsible for reconstructing that history themselves.
Most never will.
Secretary Suite Corpus Reconstruction proposes that the process become systematic.
The system would discover distributed works, resolve identities, identify duplicates, reconstruct versions, preserve provenance, recognize creative lineage, identify missing works, distinguish authorship types, and create a canonical relational record of a creator’s body of work.
The work itself could remain distributed.
The knowledge of the work would become unified.
And when combined with Genesis View, Secretary Suite could potentially preserve something that conventional archives rarely capture:
not merely what a person created, but the evolving structure of an entire creative life.
The internet scattered the work.
Secretary Suite could put the life behind it back together.
Copyright © John Swygert 2026
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