How this was built

This site turns Mark Powell and Jonathan Gifford’s Performance Thinking into a reader, a glossary, and a visual knowledge graph — all extracted directly from the print-ready manuscript PDF, with no invented content.

Structure (parts, chapters, sections, endnotes) comes from the PDF’s own font metadata, cross-checked against the book’s printed table of contents. Vocabulary for the graph is extracted with a deterministic, non-generative pipeline: recurring lowercase phrases, italicized emphasis, acronyms, and a curated reference lexicon of business and performance-arts terms — kept only when the term genuinely appears in the text. Every connection in the Atlas links back to the sentence that justifies it.

Ask the Book is the one feature that calls an AI model at runtime, rather than being built entirely ahead of time. It’s held to the same discipline as everything else here: it retrieves the most relevant real passages for a question and is instructed to answer only from them — citing which section it drew from, and saying plainly when the book doesn’t cover something, rather than filling the gap with outside knowledge.

The quiz and Rehearsal Room are built the same way as the reader: the quiz scores against the book’s own 5 principles, and the Rehearsal Room’s exercises are paraphrased from the book’s real group exercises, each linking back to its source section. The community ideas board is explicitly a demo — seeded placeholder content, with votes and comments saved only in your own browser, not shared with other visitors.