Method

The entry

The unit of work is the entry. Each entry has four registers, written in order, and a note of who wrote each.

  1. 1Trace

    What is there: a passage of a document, a photograph, a sentence someone said, a count. Place, date, source. No interpretation.

    Hands

    Human, or the document itself. Never a synthetic agent.

    Rule

    Someone can open the source.

  2. 2Reading

    What it might mean, in one or two sentences. Strong and even paranoid readings are allowed.

    Hands

    Human.

    Rule

    Names the level it speaks about.

  3. 3Fiction

    A short passage, about 150 words, set in the world where the reading is true.

    Hands

    Synthetic agent drafts (“Alter”), human edits.

    Rule

    Labelled fiction. Not evidence.

  4. 4Test

    What would show the reading is wrong, and the check. Later the result: held, broke, or unchecked.

    Hands

    Another agent (“Adversary”), another person, or the site.

    Rule

    At a different level or by a different agent from the reading.

The test result goes back to the reading: a reading that held is kept, one that broke stays in the log with the reason.

A worked entry (invented, to show the shape)

LevelInstitution · hands per register shown in brackets
TracehumanDetailed plan, section 3.2: “active frontage” appears eleven times, “residents” twice. Source and page recorded.
ReadinghumanThe plan is written for visitors. Residents are a side effect of the building programme.
Fictionsynthetic, edited by humanThe shops open at ten and close at eight. By nine the street is a set with its lights left on for an audience that has gone home. The people upstairs learn to live behind the lit window of an empty shop.
Testsynthetic + human, at street levelCounter-reading from the Adversary: the wording follows a template and says nothing about intent. Check: count occupied windows above the shops at 21:00 on two weekdays; ask the planning officer who wrote the section. Result: unchecked

The holarchy of a study

Entries sit at levels: body, street, site, institution, territory. Each entry is a whole to the entries below it and a part of the ones above. The rule that holds the method together is that a reading is tested at another level, or by another agent, than the one that made it. A reading that explains everything at its own level has no one to contradict it, which is the position the book’s narrator ends up in.

Illustration, not data. Filled square: a reading by a human. Outlined square: a test by a human or the site. Outlined diamond: a test by a synthetic agent. Dashed arrow: “is tested by”. R1 crosses three levels; R3 stays on one level and changes agent.

Rules

  1. Start from a document and a place that claim to describe each other. The gap between them is where the entries come from.
  2. Four registers, in order. Nothing enters Trace without a source someone can open.
  3. No reading judges itself. Its test is at another level or by another agent.
  4. Synthetic agents write Fiction and argue Tests. They do not supply Traces. This keeps invented facts out of the evidence. An agent may suggest where to look; a person opens the source.
  5. Every register carries its hands: human, synthetic (model named, prompt kept), or both. This doubles as the AI-use declaration institutions now ask for.
  6. Failed and abandoned entries stay in the log, with the reason.
  7. The result is a diagram and a log, not one argument. A conventional write-up is produced from the log, and the log is its audit trail. That is where the method is conventional: it is unusual in form and strict in accountability.

Care rules, taken from the book’s warning

Format of the short case

Ballard called the chapters of The Atrocity Exhibition “condensed novels”: short numbered fragments. The short case can borrow the form. One page, numbered paragraphs, each one an entry reduced to its Trace, Reading and Fiction, with the test result in a margin note.