The Music Never Stopped: A Grateful Data Compendium with a Category-Theoretic Interpretation

We present a modular, citation-bound data compendium for the Grateful Dead universe — shows, songs, performances, personnel timelines, venues, recordings, and reception — and a category-theoretic interpretation of the performance graph. The work is grounded in the archival reality that Grateful Dead history is both institutional and participatory: UCSC's Grateful Dead Archive and the Internet Archive collection preserve formal and community records , while taping and trading scholarship shows why setlists and recording metadata are cultural evidence, not merely fan trivia . The surrounding source dossier also binds the non-quantitative historical frame -- formation and Acid Test context, Wall of Sound engineering, live recording/liveness scholarship, Deadhead sociology, studio-era reception, and public recognition -- to checked sources rather than to folklore alone . The compendium integ