About Panoptica

We believe people understand the world through stories. Here at Panoptica, we aim to help you see through those stories.

What is Panoptica?

Panoptica is a new media site from Perscient, the longtime publisher of Epsilon Theory and the company that pioneered the field of narrative analytics. Our ambition is simple: to be the world’s central clearinghouse for the stories and narratives used to frame how the world is presented to you. Panoptica sees through stories not only within financial markets but across media, politics, sports, technology, and culture.

• The Zeitgeist, quantified: Panoptica content leverages Perscient's one-of-a-kind Storyboards that measure, track and visualize narratives and semantic signatures across global media. We use this technology to analyze not just the stories themselves but how they are being covered.
• Powered by humans, empowered by AI: Perscient's narrative analytics technology leverages AI to implement human insight into the structure of narratives at scale. We ingest massive quantities of digital content from across the globe and track, measure, and visualize it against our growing library of semantic signatures of the world’s stories. While we embrace the responsible use of AI, we will never use algorithms to serve up content specific to certain users or readers - all of our readers will see the same site and articles.
• New and familiar faces: Panoptica is led by managing editor Harper Hunt , executive editor Jeremy Radcliffe, senior editor Matt Ziegler and multi-media contributor Aleichia Celestina Williams (audio, video and social media). Of course, we also include articles by Epsilon Theory founder Ben Hunt and Perscient CEO Rusty Guinn. And we will feature plenty of great content from external contributors as well.
• Business model: All of Panoptica is free to read at launch. We will continue to make the bulk of the site freely available going forward, although we do expect to offer some premium features in the future for paying subscribers.

How does it work?

• Semantic signatures are the linguistic markers that define a narrative. Crafting these signatures and the additional related instructions to the LLMs that power our software is the “art” of our process. The specificity of these signatures combined with the ability of LLMs to rapidly process effectively unlimited amounts of text are what allow us to go way beyond the current standard for narrative analytics (simplistic topic and sentiment analysis).
• Our software measures the density (think prevalence, or volume) of the semantic signatures across whatever data set we choose. For Panoptica, this will typically include just about any newspaper, magazine and website you can think of, including top Substacks. And because we have access to these data sources going back, on average, 10-15 years, we can track how these signatures ebb and flow over time.
• We combine related semantic signatures to create Storyboards that bring narratives to life. Because we have transformed text into numerical data, we are able to use visualization software to create arresting charts and graphics that quickly shows when a signature is in a typical range or is very “loud” or “soft” relative to its history.
• Storyboards do not track the “reality” of our world. They measure how that reality is being presented to you. When you are looking at a Storyboard, you are seeing how others are likely to be influenced by the information you consume. You are seeing the building blocks of consensus and common knowledge. And you are seeing it visualized daily.

To learn more about our technology and software offerings, visit us at Perscient.com. We tailor custom software and enterprise solutions for investors, financial advisors, and executives who want to see stories about their businesses, their competition, their customers, and their worlds in real-time.