EMStudio
alphaThe sovereign desktop editor for Extended Matrix: read and write em.json natively, interpret stratigraphy in the graph, declare provenance in the DTC, compare on the shelf, and read the graph as a narrative. In active development, paired with EM 1.6.
What it is
EMStudio is the standalone editor for the Extended Matrix — the place where an
EM graph is authored end to end, without Blender and without yEd. It reads and
writes em.json natively, so the record is never round-tripped through a
foreign format: the graph you edit is the graph on disk.
Where EM Tools lives inside Blender and drives a 3D scene, EMStudio is the sovereign editor: it owns the graph, the documentation corpus and the narrative, and it talks to everything else — Blender, a Heriverse viewer, a Tropy library — through a single connector contract.
The six workspaces
EMStudio is organised as six tab arrangements, each a task rather than a panel:
- Documentation — bring material in: drop files, browse storage, read what a study is built from.
- Graph — interpret stratigraphy: the graph with the table below and the inspector, outliner and log to the side.
- DTC — declare provenance: the documentation corpus as a directed graph (acquisition, derivation, attribution), where the attributor is recorded as distinct from the author.
- Comparisons — hold your study next to what is not yours, on a curated shelf fenced by whose each resource is (own study · own HDT · other HDT).
- Narrative — read the graph as prose: chapters that anchor to epochs and activities, with live embeds (matrix, map, timeline) that stay in sync with the record.
- Annotator — trace regions on a photograph or drawing and tie them back to the graph.
Why it matters
EMStudio makes the two-tier model first-class — the interpretive record (stratigraphic units, epochs, activities) and the documentation/provenance corpus (the DTC) live side by side, and rights declared in the DTC bite: an asset under embargo is refused, its licence travels with it. The narrative is not a separate document but the same graph read differently, and its exports (HTML, Word, LaTeX, Jupyter) carry the live figures with them.
Manual
The full user manual — tutorial, how-to recipes, interface reference and the rationale behind the design — is on Read the Docs: EMStudio documentation.
Status & versions
EMStudio is developed within the StratiGraph project. It is in active development (1.6-dev), paired with EM 1.6 and built on s3Dgraphy 1.6. English is the default interface language. Because it is pre-release, expect the interface and the feature set to keep moving — the manual tracks the current state, and news of what is landing appears on the News page.