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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30824 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30824/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Event-based News Narrative Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08351/) (2023)
- [Mixed Multi-Model Semantic Interaction for Graph-based Narrative Visualizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06452/) (2023)
- [Design guidelines for narrative maps in sensemaking tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12205/) (2021)
- [Narrative Trails: A Method for Coherent Storyline Extraction via Maximum Capacity Path Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15681/) (2025)
- [Interactive Narrative Analytics: Bridging Computational Narrative Extraction and Human Sensemaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11459/) (2026)
- [Semantic Interaction for Narrative Map Sensemaking: An Insight-based Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29651/) (2026)
- [Agenda-based Narrative Extraction: Steering Pathfinding Algorithms with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29661/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.