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Vignette 5: bring in a table

The situation

Sam wants Claude to be able to look at the 4-row sample table from the index page and answer questions about it, not just about notes written in prose.

What you type

Sam writes a small oracle note whose body is just the table, and asks:

"Which of my tumour samples are ER-positive?"

This uses the Oracle, not murmurent_data/. The table is small and is the fact Sam wants to keep and search, so it belongs inside an Oracle note, where Claude reads it during an ordinary recall. A full spreadsheet file that you would not paste inline goes in murmurent_data/ instead (see vignette 4), where an agent reads it on demand.

What Murmurent does

  1. A small table can live inside an Oracle note as a plain markdown table, with no special format required.
  2. Claude reads the table directly from the note and can answer questions about it.
  3. This illustrative table is fabricated, so sensitivity: standard is appropriate. Real clinicopathological or patient data must be marked sensitivity: clinical: that keeps it in Sam's personal vault only, and it can never be published to the lab (see vignette 6). Only small tables belong inside a note; a full spreadsheet file goes in murmurent_data/ (see vignette 4), and large data files live in the lab's append_only/ storage.
flowchart LR
    A[Put a small table in a vault note] --> B[Claude reads it]
    B --> C[Ask questions about your samples]

Clinical data stays personal: it never leaves Sam's vault.

What you get

---
title: brca_er sample table
date: 2026-07-30
project: brca_er
sensitivity: standard
tags: [esr1, samples, breast-cancer]
sources: ['@sam']
---

# brca_er sample table

| sample | type   | ER status | grade |
|--------|--------|-----------|-------|
| s1     | tumour | pos       | 2     |
| s2     | tumour | pos       | 3     |
| s3     | tumour | neg       | 2     |
| s4     | normal | neg       | 1     |

Claude can now answer "which tumour samples are ER-positive?" with "s1 and s2" directly from this note.

Under the hood

Sensitivity governs what can later be published: see the data storage rule and the oracle entry schema. For the difference between small notes like this one and bulk data files, see memory tiers: tier-2 notes versus tier-3 bulk data.