Map

The Map panel draws every point in the space at its projected position in a WebGL scatter plot, with cluster labels and boundaries on top. It is where you select points, and almost every other panel reads from that selection.

Tool shortcuts

i q m p n h

Selection cap

25,000 points

View modes

2D, 2.5D

Where to find it

Every layout preset ships a Map tab already open, and in most presets it cannot be closed, which is why Map is not listed in the View menu. If you have several maps in a space, each one opens as its own tab with its own selection, bags and tools.

Points at their projected positions, with cluster labels and hull boundaries drawn on top.

Navigating

• Pan. With the Select tool active, drag anywhere on empty canvas.
• Zoom. Scroll. Zooming also changes which depth of the cluster hierarchy is labeled, so more specific cluster names appear as you go in.
• Orbit. In 2.5D only, drag with the right mouse button to tilt and rotate the camera.
• Hover. Moving the pointer draws a leader line to the nearest point and pops that point’s label, plus labels for its neighbors. Hover shows titles only. To read field values, open the Inspector or Reader panel.
• Cluster labels. Click a cluster label to select that cluster’s points in place, without moving the camera. Double-click it to fly to the cluster and zoom to fit.

Tools

The tool island is the small floating toolbar on the map. It carries seven interaction modes, all of which also have a single-key shortcut, plus one overlay toggle that sits among them:

Tool	Key	What it does
Select	I	Click to select the point nearest the cursor, click that same point again to deselect it, shift-click to add points to the selection or drop them from it. Dragging pans.
Lasso	Q	Draw a freehand loop; everything inside is committed as a selection.
Magic	M	Draw a loop, then snap the result out to whichever cluster overlaps your loop best.
Path	P	Draw a stroke; points within the path radius are collected.
Note	N	Click to drop a note on the map, attached to the nearest point.
Landmarks	L	Not a tool — see below. Shows or hides the gold landmark rings and leaves your active tool alone.
Reconstruct		Click anywhere to sample the nearest points and ask the backend to invert a distance-weighted mean embedding. The result appears in the Reconstruction Panel.
Heatmap	H	Click one point to recolor every other point by its true high-dimensional cosine similarity to it.

Between Note and Reconstruct sits Landmarks, which looks like a tool but is not one: it rings the most salient point of each visible cluster in gold and leaves your active tool alone, so you can turn the rings on without giving up Select. L does the same thing from the keyboard. Both are inert on a space that has never had landmarks generated, where the button is greyed out. See Landmarks.

While a lasso, magic lasso or path gesture is in flight, hold

Ctrl or Ctrl to add the result to the

active bag instead of replacing the selection, or ⇧ or

Alt to remove it from the active bag.

Three more buttons sit below the tools:

• Clear clears selections, selected bags and context points on every open map.
• Delete deletes every bag on this map. There is no confirmation.
• Pages and Settings open those panels.

The whole island is draggable. Drag it to an edge and it snaps to the top, bottom, left or right of the panel.

Heads up

Two toolbar shortcuts do nothing on this map. R (Semantic Ruler) and J (Journey) set the active tool, but the WebGL renderer has no mode for either, so it falls back to Select. Both tools work on Map (Legacy).

On-map controls

A second floating widget, also draggable, groups three controls:

• Boundaries: Hull, Territory or Off. Hull traces an outline around the points of each visible cluster. Territory instead tiles the whole map into one region per cluster, each region being the area closest to that cluster’s center. Off skips boundary computation entirely.

• View: 2D or 2.5D. 2.5D tilts the scene and enables right-drag orbit. Reduction always produces two dimensions, so 2.5D is a render mode, not a third axis of data.

• Color: what drives point color. The default is Clusters. Any categorical column colors points by value and shows a value-to-swatch legend; any numeric or date column maps onto a continuous gradient with min and max labels.

• Trajectory: pick a numeric or date column and the map draws a flow arrow through the data in that column’s order — a smooth curve fitted through five equal-count bins, with a chevron at each transition, summarizing which way the space drifts as the value rises. Click the active field again to turn it off. With one field on, a Trajectory range slider appears below: drag the two thumbs to draw only part of the value range.

  A single trajectory is colored blue to red along the value. Turn on Split by Category and you get one arrow per category value instead, each in that category’s color, with a legend below the slider — hover a legend row to highlight its arrow, or hover an arrow on the map to dim the others and tint the points it was built from. A topic_index field draws one arrow per topic. Hiding a category hides its arrow.

Separately, the band-pass widget at the top of the map filters by value: pick a numeric or date field, then drag the two thumbs. Points outside the range are dimmed rather than removed, so you keep the shape of the whole space. Choose None to clear it.

Selecting points

1. Pick a tool. Press Q for the lasso, or click it in the tool island.
2. Draw around the region. The outline previews as you drag; releasing commits the points inside.
3. Check the count. Panels that read the selection, such as Inspector and Bags, update immediately.
4. Save it. Open the Bags panel and click New bag to keep the selection as a named group. A selection is temporary; a bag is not.

Map versus Map (Legacy)

Two map panels are registered, and they are different renderers:

• Map is the current one: a custom WebGL point renderer, with contour geometry computed off the main thread. This page describes it.
• Map (Legacy) is the older Three.js scene. Several features were never ported to the new renderer and still work only there, including hand-gesture control, in-scene journey paths, in-scene gradient surfaces, geographic tile backdrops, the Semantic Ruler, the Waypoint and Journey tools, the on-map search bar and the right-click selection menu.

If a feature you read about elsewhere in these docs is missing from the map in front of you, open Map (Legacy) from View > Exploration before assuming it is broken.

Limits

• A lasso, magic lasso or path commit is capped at 25,000 points. Anything past that is dropped silently, with only a console warning.
• Cluster outlines are computed from a sample of at most 4,000 points per cluster, so a boundary is an approximation of a dense cluster’s true extent.
• At most 20 hover labels are drawn at once.
• This map has no search box. Searching points by title is on Map (Legacy).

Read nextBagsTurn a selection into something that survives your next click.