Information Terra: A Narrative-Anchored Semantic-First Projection of Document Embeddings

Abstract: We introduce Information Terra, a narrative-anchored semantic-first projection that places a document corpus on an Earth-like globe whose poles are two user-chosen endpoint documents and whose prime meridian is the great-circle geodesic between them on the embedding hypersphere -- so latitude encodes narrative progress and longitude thematic deviation. Land features are recovered from document density via kernel density estimation and labeled by theme. A narrative trail built from the underlying narrative coherence graph, and constrained to be monotone in geodesic progress, provides a readable storyline. The projection's axes are semantically grounded in the user's chosen narrative endpoints, and the globe metaphor affords rotation and antipodal reading. We demonstrate the method on a 540-article Cuban Protests corpus, showing a storyline from Obama's 2016 visit to the 2021 International Aid during the protests.