The tree mostly grows by addition. New folder, new category, the scheme expanding to hold more. Of the 956 events the Classification Lab logged, the overwhelming share is simply creation. To move or rename a thing already filed is far rarer — and where it happens, someone has decided the old label was wrong.
Creation is the tree breathing in. The renamings are the rarer act: the tree correcting itself.
the largest relabelingFrom manuscript to broadcast
The biggest single act of reclassification moved seventeen audio files at once. They had lived inside a novel's source folder, named the way a manuscript names things — capitals, spaces, an underscore. In one commit they were lifted out into the public tree and renamed for the open web.
Nothing about the sound changed. Everything about what the file was changed. That is the whole argument of a rename in one move.
two smaller correctionsAn accident, and a collision
Most renamings are quieter than that, and just as pointed. One strips away the mark of how a file arrived:
Another resolves a collision the repository grew into. Two projects each shipped a file called, generically, README.md — fine in isolation, ambiguous together — and on the same day both were given their project's name:
core sample · the classification events
Seventeen files carried from manuscript to broadcast. An accidental "(6)" struck off. Two READMEs given their right names. Each one a sound, a file, a label — unchanged in substance, reclassified in kind.
A rename is the cheapest edit in the repository and the most honest. It admits that what a thing is called was, for a while, wrong.