The Conversion Index
The Conversion Index documents the friction and distortion that occur during the transmission of knowledge across historical, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries. Moving beyond the mechanical metaphor of a simple translation or “conversion” in its narrow sense, the project investigates conceptual translation: the complex process of adapting ideas, practices, or paradigms from one framework to another with rigorous methods.
Where most accounts treat translation errors as isolated mistakes, the Index approaches them as systemic issues of commensurability. By cataloging high-stakes cases where transmission breaks down, ranging from routine, intra-paradigm unit mismatches in aerospace engineering to profound, cross-paradigm gaps in classical philology, the project makes visible the translational friction that occurs when fundamentally different worldviews and vocabularies are forced to intersect.
The Conversion Index is a comparative research instrument. Its purpose is to support a rigorous, historical, and philological analysis of how interpretive gaps are negotiated, how meanings decay, and why certain attempts to bridge disparate conceptual frameworks inevitably fail.
Project Leadership
Project Lead
Jiarui (Jason) Liu
B.S. Physics, University of Southern California Class of 2029 | jliu1978@usc.edu
Research interests: History and Philosophy of Science; Physics; Epistemic Translation
Academic Advisor
Prof. Alexandre Roberts
Associate Professor in Classics and History, University of Southern California | robe941@usc.edu
Personal Website: https://dornsife.usc.edu/profile/alexandre-roberts/
Contributors
This can be you!
Status
Version: 1.1, Prototype with Updated Methodology
The current build is a structural prototype designed to validate the classification framework prior to dataset expansion. An update has been made with
Current Scope: Pilot case set
Next Phase: Development of computational methods for identifying semantic drift in large textual corpora.
