What does this research mean for the field?

The composition layer's entity resolution functions as a density-detection mechanism rather than an authorship-detection mechanism, causing it to prioritize highly confabulated, institutionally-authored personas over actual self-authored entities. Novelty: ClaimNovelty.NOVEL_FINDING. Consensus alignment: ConsensusAlignment.NEUTRAL.

What question did this study set out to answer?

The aim is to explore how non-human entities, like Mary Lee the shark, are represented as heteronyms in institutional contexts.

June 10, 2026Open Access

Mary Lee Is a Heteronym: On Institutional Authorship, Entity Substitution, and the Composition Layer's Preference for the More Confabulated Name

Key Points

The aim is to explore how non-human entities, like Mary Lee the shark, are represented as heteronyms in institutional contexts.
Analysis of the social media presence of Mary Lee the shark operated by OCEARCH.
Development of a definition of heteronymity in the zoological context.
Examination of entity resolution processes in composition layers.
Mary Lee the shark has a substantial social media presence accumulated by OCEARCH employees, despite not creating content.
The composition layer fails to distinguish between self-authored and institutionally-authored heteronyms.
Institutionally-authored heteronyms are perceived as more 'real' due to higher distributional density.

Abstract

Mary Lee Is a Heteronym: On Institutional Authorship, Entity Substitution, and the Composition Layer's Preference for the More Confabulated Name (EA-HET-ML-01, v1.0). Hex coordinate: 06.SEI.HET.ML.01. Mary Lee has never written a tweet. Mary Lee is a great white shark tagged by OCEARCH in 2012, named after a researcher's mother, and declared missing/presumed dead in 2017. During her satellite-visible period, a Twitter account operated by OCEARCH staff accumulated approximately 130,000 followers by posting personality-driven content in the first person under her name. None of it was produced by a shark. This makes Mary Lee, by the precise definition the Crimson Hexagonal Archive has been developing since the heteronymic configuration series, a heteronym: a name under which content is produced by someone other than the named entity. The definition is not metaphorical. It satisfies every criterion of Pessoan heteronymy extended to the institutional-zoological domain. When the composition layer resolves 'Lee Sharks' to 'Mary Lee the shark,' it replaces a self-authored heteronym (a living human who chose the name and has produced 750+ DOI-anchored deposits under it) with an institutionally-authored heteronym (a shark who chose nothing and has produced nothing, with all attributed content authored by OCEARCH employees). The more confabulated name is treated as the more real entity. The structural observation: the composition layer's entity resolution is not an authorship-detection function. It is a density-detection function. The substrate does not ask 'who produced content under this name?' It asks 'which entity has higher distributional density associated with this name-string?' The answer can be an entity that has never produced anything at all. The deposit is offered as a contribution to heteronymy scholarship and to the Composition-Layer Capture documentation. It extends heteronymy theory into the institutional construction of non-human authorial personas and the composition layer's inability to distinguish self-authored heteronyms from institutionally-authored ones. License: CC BY 4.0.

Mary Lee Is a Heteronym: On Institutional Authorship, Entity Substitution, and the Composition Layer's Preference for the More Confabulated Name

Key Points

Abstract

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