Glossary¶
Canonical terms for cs-lewis-backend. Use these consistently across code, docs, and conversation.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Content piece | A single unit of content. Exists once; referenced from many places. The same piece reached via two routes is still the same piece. |
| Text piece | The unified content type — passage / letter / essay, distinguished by tags. |
| Passage | A short evergreen Lewis text piece; the canonical traversal starting point and primary interaction unit. Body is plain text (audio sync requires a clean string). |
| Letter | Lewis's words, held in full. Can be the source of a Passage. Carries recipient and original date; rich text body; no audio. |
| Essay | Editorial piece by a named contemporary contributor (not Lewis). Sourced from Substack. Has an Author reference. |
| Podcast | Longer-form external audio — embedded, not CMS-hosted. Separate shape from text pieces. Phase 1 is a schema stub only. |
| Work | A book or letter collection a passage came from. Proxy for books not held in full — drives the source ladder to purchase. Source reference only in V1 (no e-reader): cover, synopsis, publication date, future buy link. |
| Content Item | Polymorphic bridge across Passage / Letter / Essay / Podcast. What the graph traverses, Journeys reference, and users save. Uniform traversal interface over separate storage types. |
| Journey | Editorially curated sequence of pieces, arranged into chapters. Belongs to one or more Themes. A user can have multiple journeys in progress simultaneously. |
| Portal | The same object as a Journey, viewed as a doorway — the entry animation. Don't model as two things. |
| Chapter | One slice of a Journey. References library content (opening passage, primary reading, supporting content). Holds no body of its own. |
| Theme | A navigable world / mood filter with bespoke portal imagery and colour scheme. Finite controlled vocabulary in V1: Imagination, Joy/Longing, Myth, Grief, Faith, Friendship, Wonder, Reason, Love (9 themes; may grow pre-launch). Content pieces and Journeys are tagged to Themes. Switching a Theme recolours the whole UI. |
| Explore | The open-world browse surface (graph traversal); search lives inside it. |
| Dive deeper | Tag-graph traversal surface within Explore or a reading screen. |
| Front door | Narnia — the deliberate entry wedge for newcomers. |
| Soul Map | The user's personal record of what they've read and reflected on — the visual representation of bookmarks + reflections on Profile. Visualization deferred out of V1; inputs (accounts + reflection storage) ship in V1 so data accrues for Phase 2. |
| Source ladder | Passage → chapter audio → bookstore purchase handoff. Narnia skips the chapter rung (HarperCollins rights). A passage's source is always shown. |
| Thought provoker | Pre-reading prompt/lens shared by every content piece (e.g. "What if loneliness was a dog?"). Scopes to the chapter when the piece sits in a Journey, otherwise to the standalone piece. Earlier called "AI interpretation / lens." |
| Deeper meaning | Longer AI-assisted interpretive annotation (CMS text block); needs editorial QA. Likely deprioritized in V1 — client has no editorial team to QA it. |
| Reflection | User-generated community note attached to a content piece. Moderated ("publish, not post" — never appears as raw user input). Surfaced as ambient presence ("14 have sat with this"), not a comment thread. |
| Prompt | A standalone reflection question, reusable across pieces and overrideable per chapter. |
| Tag-overlap graph | Computed edges between content items based on shared tags. Deterministic, build-time. Powers Explore and related-content surfaces. No stored edges (except editor hero-pins). |
| Provenance | Tag axis: evergreen (Lewis's existing corpus) vs editorial (produced into the CMS — essays, commissioned work). |
| Motif | Fine-grained tag that cuts across works; powers surprise jumps between pieces. |
| Life stage | Single tag per piece (youth → grief). |
| Register | Tag axis: bedtime / morning / anytime. |
| Tone depth | Tag axis: meaning (default) / theological (opt-in). |
| Daily Drop | Scheduled "today's passage" pointer. Schema can land at MVP; scheduling UI is Phase 2. |