In the spirit of the Bayeux Tapestry, the 11th-century embroidered chronicle of 1066.
Hic EstHere your small saga is stitched - and read like a historian
The old chronicle captions every scene with "here": here the ship sails, here the feast begins. Paste the story of one small saga - a party, a power cut, a lost key - told by one, two or three people. Watch it laid out on linen, then find out whose version it really is.
1 The accounts
One teller is enough. Add a second or third account of the same saga to let the chronicler compare versions. You can also drop a .txt file onto a box.
2 The linen
Scroll the linen sideways; tap a scene to read it.
In the border
3 Stitch it properly
One run stitches four to eight scenes from every account, with a caption, a motif and the people in each, then reads the record like a historian: whose version it is, what it leaves out, the slow, direct and sudden causes, what changed and what stayed, a pattern historians know, notes for the border and one question for the tellers.
The verdict on the record follows a fixed order: the teller's version if only one person tells it; otherwise a contested thread if two tellers cannot both be right about at least one point of fact; otherwise a fair chronicle.
4 Saved sagas
Eight motifs on the linen
Every scene is stitched with one motif. Before a run the page picks it from keywords in the sentence; the chronicler picks it from the whole saga.
How the free side works
Each account is split into sentences. The rough stitch takes the first account's sentences in order - up to eight, evenly spaced, always keeping the first and the last - and gives each one a motif from keywords (calls and texts make a message; bangs, breakages and the weather an omen; food a feast; cheering and finding things a triumph; slips and contests a struggle; going and coming a journey; carrying and fixing labour; anything else a council). The people in a scene are the capitalised names the page finds, plus the teller for "I" and "we". A stitched reply is checked against the accounts: the verdict against the number of tellers and the disputes, every figure named in the accounts, every scene citing a teller on screen, every dispute setting two tellers side by side, and no he or she for anyone.
Hic Est is a keepsake. It never decides who is right - it lays the versions side by side, the way a careful historian would.