About

Welcome to The Codex

The Codex is an interactive online publishing platform that was designed to make it easy to grasp a complicated story.

Background

Conventional news reporting doesn't really help us understand stories of any complexity.

The complicated story of State Capture in South Africa is an example of such a story. According to Wikipedia, the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture (the Zondo Commission) had, between January 2018 and December 2020, interviewed 278 witnesses and collected 159,109 pages and 1 exabyte of data as evidence.

Nobody can be expected to assimilate that much information in any conventional way.

How The Codex works

The Codex is an interactive database application that allows you to navigate a story at will, moving from topic to topic in any order, getting to know the players, and digging deeper into sub-stories that take your interest.

Relationships

The Codex keeps track of the relationships, where they exist, between each of the players in the story. The Codex uses this information to draw a network map on the fly for any entity in the system. Network maps help you see the connections between individuals at many degrees of separation.

Timelines

Events are actions that individuals carried out or participated in, or occurrences that affected them. In the Codex, events are linked together to form timelines. Codex can reveal the timelines for any entity as well as for any related entity. Timelines help you understand the cause end effect between superficially unrelated events and people.

Summaries

Network maps and timelines are shown alongside the textual content of the story, and provide helpful reference material that make the story easier to understand.

Text content is arranged into sections and chapters, and is highly summarised so that you don't have to wade through oceans of information to get to the point. But the Codex always lets you drill down into the detail if that's what you want.