Polytope is an experiment, a fundraiser, and hopefully also useful to those pursuing research in the arts and humanities without complete access to the full extent of a supportive insitutional apparatus: the degree to which it is commensurate with the last of those depends, of course, on your intent, expectations, and willingness to explore and exploit some of its features.

Currently Windows only; Linux is in the post. Ignore any AI features at will and wire up to libraries as appropriate.

Thank you.

Polytope

‘Research intelligence for arts and humanities scholarship’

Polytope is a retrieval-augmented research platform built from scratch for humanities workflows. It combines semantic search, citation-grounded synthesis, concept tracing, and multi-source academic discovery into a single dark-academia-themed interface — all runnable on a laptop with no GPU, no cloud API keys, and no paid subscriptions required.

What It Does

Search Semantic search over your corpus with multi-query expansion, reciprocal rank fusion, and cross-encoder reranking. Optional hybrid web search (Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, DuckDuckGo — all free; plus Brave, Tavily, Google Scholar with API keys) running concurrently with corpus search. Switch between Search, Synthesise, and Trace sub-modes from the inline options bar.

→ Synthesise Citation-grounded synthesis with two modes: Local (corpus chunks only — works with what’s in your library) and Cloud (sends corpus to Gemini, which focuses on relevant sources and supplements with its own broader knowledge). Four style presets (Explanatory, Academic, Concise, Comparative). Cloud falls back to Groq when rate-limited. Algorithmic TextRank/TF-IDF fallback works on any machine with no API key.

→ Trace Concept evolution timelines, thinker comparisons, concept networks, and semantic similarity — powered by NER extraction and embedding-based clustering.

→ Analyse Distant-reading toolkit over the corpus: KWIC concordances (whole-word/case-sensitive, configurable context window, doc/left/right sort), Collocation statistics (Dunning log-likelihood, PMI, t-score, raw count, with minimal/standard/custom stop-lists), and Voyant Tools hand-off (POSTs the corpus to voyant-tools.org from the browser, no CORS hop).

Ingest Build your corpus from PDFs, DOIs (CrossRef + Unpaywall), web pages (with Playwright fallback for JS-rendered pages), OpenAlex (250M+ works), and CORE (280M+ full-text papers). Scanned/image-only PDFs are detected early and rejected with a clear error instead of silently ingesting zero chunks.

Corpus Browse, search, and manage your ingested corpus with metadata.

Reader In-browser PDF viewer for corpus documents with zoom, rotation, pagination, and search.

Notebook Multi-provider research assistant: chat with your corpus with multi-turn memory, multi-source grounding (corpus + web + citation graph), streaming responses, and generate summaries, outlines, study guides, timelines, comparisons, and key concept extractions — all source-cited. Connect OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek, or Ollama from the settings panel; switch providers from the notebook dropdown. Rate-limit detection with automatic cooldown and fallback. Warnings surfaced in the UI for rate limits and corpus retrieval issues. Algorithmic fallback when no provider is connected.

Library Universal search across 8 scholarly sources — OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, CrossRef, CORE, Internet Archive, Open Library, Gutenberg, and HathiTrust — with source chips, type tabs (Papers/Books/All), and one-click ingest into your corpus.

Academia Search Academia.edu via their native API (api.academia.edu), with Semantic Scholar as fallback. Free papers download directly; paywalled PDFs open on Academia.edu where you can sign in.

Writer Full document editor powered by embedded LibreOffice Portable. Create, edit, and export ODT/DOCX documents. Sidebar auto-collapses to maximise writing space; session persists across mode switches.

Praxiomatic Tabbed Chromium browser with praxiomatic.org as homepage. Open multiple tabs (Ctrl+T), close tabs (Ctrl+W), and search via DuckDuckGo from the URL bar. Full navigation toolbar with back, forward, refresh, home, and sidebar toggle.

Integrations Connect five external research tools from the Settings panel: Zotero (library sync + import + citation formatting), Obsidian (export linked Markdown notes + vault import), Elicit (AI paper discovery merged into Library search), Gephi (GEXF export for citation/concept network visualization), Mendeley (library import).

Key Features

– No API keys required — Runs out of the box with local embeddings (all-MiniLM-L6-v2), algorithmic synthesis, and free APIs (Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, DuckDuckGo, CORE, Academia.edu). Web search returns 100+ academic results out of the box. Model preloaded at startup — no cold-start wait on first search.
– Multi-provider AI — Connect OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude), Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek, or local Ollama from the settings panel. Switch providers and models at runtime; API keys stored server-side. Algorithmic fallback always available.
– Stance classification — Understand how sources engage with ideas: endorsing, critiquing, extending, applying
– Citation graphs — D3.js force-directed visualisations of citation networks, influence diagrams, concept co-occurrence
– Export — Markdown, BibTeX, JSON, DOCX, and GEXF (Gephi) export for search results, synthesis, notebooks, concept traces, and citation/concept networks
– Citation engine — CSL-powered formatting with 9 built-in styles (Chicago Notes, MLA, MHRA, Turabian, Oxford, Harvard, APA) and 10,000+ available via citeproc-py-styles
– Document writer — Native rich-text editor with DOCX export and optional LibreOffice Portable integration
– In-app browser — Tabbed Chromium browser (Praxiomatic mode) with DuckDuckGo search, new-tab/close-tab shortcuts, and sidebar toggle
– Dark academia UI — Garamond-family typography, animated network canvas, 10-mode sidebar
– Tool integrations — Zotero, Obsidian, Elicit, Gephi, and Mendeley — connect from Settings, sync libraries, export notes, and discover papers without leaving Polytope
– Desktop application — Standalone Windows installer via Electron + PyInstaller. No Python, no terminal, no dependencies — just install and run.

MIT License.

Polytope by Praxiomatic™

© 2026 Praxiomatic Ltd.