Tech Journal: Why I’m Building the Echo Lab
(and How It Thinks in Triplets)
🟡 Introduction
I’m not just trying to build something functional. I’m trying to build something that remembers — and reveals.
Echo Lab isn’t just a web app or a personal coding project. It’s a system for holding and honoring Black intellectual and cultural memory — not as a static archive, but as a network of living relationships.
At the heart of it is a relational schema — figures, titles, and concepts — a structure that reflects how ideas move, link, and echo across time. This project is about tracking thought, not just cataloging facts. About memory as a pattern, not just storage.
🔶 The Core Schema — Figures, Titles, Concepts
The foundation of the Echo Lab is built on three interconnected entities:
Figures → Cultural agents (like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, etc.).
Titles → The creative or intellectual works those figures produced (books, essays, speeches, songs).
Concepts → The ideas, themes, or questions those titles explore.
In practice, this looks like:
Each title then links to a set of concepts — freedom, mourning, citizenship, feminism — and those concepts link back to other figures. It’s not just about surfacing information — it’s about surfacing relationships.
🔶 Why Triplets?
Triplets let me trace relationships — not just records.
A figure leads to a title. That title opens up a concept. And that concept doesn’t sit still — it points outward, backward, forward, sometimes sideways. It creates resonance between thinkers who never met, movements separated by decades, or ideas expressed through poetry, oration, and code.
This isn’t linear citation. It’s memory in circulation.
In Echo Lab, a title isn’t just a container for facts — it’s a carrier of meaning. Concepts become connective tissue. They help surface the conversations already happening in the archive — and the ones still waiting to be heard.
🔶 The Philosophy Behind the Tech
This isn’t about organizing knowledge neatly. It’s about designing a system that lets ideas move.
Traditional databases tend to flatten — they prioritize precision, not potential. But Black thought doesn’t always move in clean lines. It loops. It doubles back. It breaks form to make form. And so the structure behind Echo Lab has to be more than functional — it has to be resonant.
A concept doesn’t belong to one person. It resounds across generations. One title’s language of mourning becomes another’s blueprint for resistance. One figure’s essay echoes in a poem written fifty years later.
Echo Lab doesn’t just ask what was said — it asks who else said something like this, what ideas echo through this, what titles keep returning?
It’s not a static archive. It’s a listening system.
🔚 Closing
Echo Lab is still early. The interface is simple. The data is sparse. But the architecture is tuned toward something bigger:
A way of listening. A way of showing how Black thought travels — not just across texts, but across time, across generations, across genres.
It doesn’t aim to preserve knowledge as a static thing. It wants to track how it moves, how it gathers meaning as it passes through different hands.
If I’ve built it right, it won’t feel like a spreadsheet.
It’ll feel like an echo you can follow.
Wow, this was a super inter post Shayne! Just out of curiosity, what do you think people need most in order to acquire that black thought mentality?