What this site knows

Reading takes no account. These pages are files on a server, no analytics run on them, and everything the library remembers about your reading it remembers inside your own browser. Signed out, the site makes no request on your behalf at all: the code that would talk to a server stops before it asks.

There is now one account, and it is optional. It exists so that notes can follow a reader between devices, and so that a reader can propose a connection and be told what came of it. Signing in is the only thing that moves your reading off your own machine.

Signed out: your browser, and nowhere else

Your reading position in each work, your annotations, your view settings, and where you are in a course are stored in your browser’s own storage: local storage for the small records, an in-browser database for the annotations. They stay on the device that made them. They do not sync, and we cannot read them.

The direct consequence: clearing your browser’s site data for this domain erases your annotations and your places, and there is no copy anywhere else. That is the price of not holding your reading on a server, and it is the trade this library made deliberately.

Signed in: what the library holds

Signing in does not give this site your password. You are sent to the studio that runs the library, it checks the session you already have there, and it sends you back with a code good for sixty seconds and one use. That code buys a token this browser keeps for thirty days.

From then on the library holds, against an account number: the text of each note, the passage it was written on, your position in each work, and each panel you save, with its title, its gloss, and the pictures and quotations on it. That is what syncing is. It holds nothing else about the reading. It does not hold your name.

A proposal is the one place an email is kept. When you propose that an artwork depicts a subject, that two records are linked, or a reading for a course, the library stores what you wrote, your account number and your email address. For a reading, what you wrote includes its framework, the course you named and the passages you cite. Your address is shown only to an editor, or to the instructor of that course, so they can write back with a reason. If a proposal is accepted into the corpus, the published row credits the account number and never the address. An accepted reading also carries the name of the person who signed it.

Signing out removes the token from this browser. It does not erase the copy the library holds, and nothing on this site does yet.

What leaves your browser either way

The interface typeface is served by Adobe Fonts, whose licence does not permit self-hosting. Loading a page therefore makes one request to Adobe, which sees what such a request always shows: your address and which page asked. The reading face is served from this site and makes no such request.

The server keeps ordinary web logs. Requesting a page tells the host that a page was requested, from where, at what time. That is the record any web server keeps in order to be a web server. It is not joined to anything else.

If you write to us

A message sent to an address on the contact page is an email, and is kept the way email is kept. Course correspondence goes to the instructor of record and is that institution’s to hold.

Changes

If what the site stores or what it requests changes, this page changes with it. It describes the software as it is, not as a policy hopes it might be.