NORAEarly Access

Investigator Path

Evidence analysis track — hashing, retrieval, LLM extraction, adversarial validation, and audit tools.

Front Matter

01Meridian-Canon {.unnumbered}02Overture — Fifteen Minutes {.unnumbered}03Preface {.unnumbered}04Syllabus {.unnumbered}05Prerequisites & self-diagnostic {.unnumbered}06How to read this book {.unnumbered}07Reading paths {.unnumbered}

Part I — Foundations

08The Crisis of Personal Digital Evidence 09Falsifiability as a Design Principle 10An Engineer's Tour of the Federal Rules of Evidence 11The Canon Standard

Part II — CS Building Blocks

12Cryptographic Hashing 13Digital Signatures (Ed25519)14Canonicalization (RFC 8785 JCS)15Schemas as Contracts 16Vector Embeddings & Semantic Retrieval 17Hybrid Retrieval (BM25 + Dense + RRF + Rerank)18Information Extraction with Local LLMs 19Adversarial Validation & Tri-Model Consensus

Part III — System Architecture

20The Seven-Layer Pipeline 21PostgreSQL as Evidence Substrate 22Idempotent Ingestion & Custody Logs 23Procedural-Legal Primitives 24The Time-Aware Relationship Graph (TARG)25Epistemic Neutrality Masking (ENM)26The Five-Challenge Refutation Harness 27The Four Attestation Kinds

Part IV — Engineering Practice

28Schema Design & Migrations 29Local-First Chunking & Privilege 30Key Management 31Hash-Chained Audit Logging 32The Reference Verifier (Seven-Step Protocol)33The Admissibility Auditor

Part V — Build Your Own

34Capstone: Designing a Domain-Specific Meridian 35Customization Patterns 36Conformance Testing 37Operationalization and Deployment

Appendices

38Appendix A — Glossary {.unnumbered}39Appendix B — A Worked Attestation, Every Byte Explained {.unnumbered}40Appendix C — Wisconsin & federal evidence law primer {.unnumbered}41Appendix D — Lab Manual & Autograder {.unnumbered}42Appendix E — Comparative architectures (Sigstore, SLSA, C2PA, …) {.unnumbered}43Appendix F — Divergences from the spec {.unnumbered}

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