The institutes study their subjects.
This one studies their proportions.
618 is the parent institute of the federation: the register of its members, the charter they hold in common, and the treaty office for the borders between them.
It owns no collection. Its material is the relations — which institute holds which ground, where two of them meet, and what each has agreed not to claim.
The register
Six members. Page counts are what the sitemaps report, not what the institutes claim. The register never ranks; the order below is by size alone.
| Institute | Subject | Interior logic | Pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corpus | The scholarly record, read as a library | the reading rooms | 8,692 |
| Symbolic | How meaning is compressed into marks | the atlas & its cabinets | 245 |
| Hanzi Museum | Characters as cosmology — a wing of Symbolic | the museum of rooms | 192 |
| Written | The world's scripts as artefacts | the museum floors of type | 94 |
| Canto 粵學院 | Cantonese culture first, language second | the geographic arc | 24 |
| Interfaces | Where the hand meets the machine | the building as grain-zoom | 18 |
Verified 1 August 2026. A member that stops answering comes off the register the same day.
In outline
Named because they are promised, not because they exist. No domains are listed until there is something behind them.
- Urbanity — the city inspected; the research floor beneath a city atlas
- Hellenic — one unbroken language, thirty-four centuries
- LocIntel — places graded in the open, the standard kept apart from the shop
- Timesys — how civilisations have measured and structured time
The charter
- One subject each. An institute holds one ground and names its borders.
- One interior logic each, never repeated. Reading rooms, cabinets, floors, an arc, a grain-zoom — each institute is moved through differently.
- Provenance over ranking. Every claim carries its source. An estimate is returned as an estimate, never as a confident wrong answer.
- Grain, not rank. Ordering imposes one reader's decision on everyone. Where the material allows it, the decision is returned to the reader.
- Corrections are published, not quietly made. A record that changes says so.
- Institutes are standards, not stores. Applications and shops sit outside this register — they may cite an institute, never speak for it.
The treaty office
Where two institutes could claim the same ground, the border is written down, tested, and published. A treaty states what each holds, the test that decides an ambiguous case, and the worked examples that show it applied.
| Treaty | The border | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Symbolic ↔ Written | Symbolic studies the encoding; Written studies the artefact. The test: could it be a poster, and does it still matter if you cannot see it? | Adopted |
| Symbolic ↔ Hanzi | Hanzi is a wing, not a peer. Han semantics are read at the Museum; Han typography at Written. | Standing |
| Urbanity ↔ athens.taipei | The research floor and the review desk: one explains the city, one reviews it. | Pending — awaits Urbanity |
Outside the register
Applications and shops are not institutes and are not listed as members. They carry the same doctrine on provenance, and they sell — which is precisely why they sit outside. They are run from mikko.gr.