Methods, protocols and research instruments for examining artworks, sources, encounters and critical accounts. Documentation records how each approach works, what has been tested and what remains unresolved.
Methods and published reading
- Relational Archival Investigation (RAI) examines what relationships among documentary assertions can establish. Read the main paper, documentary supplement and extended case studies.
- Phenomenological Methods and Diagnostic Reading examines observation, inference and critical decisions. Diagnostics Without Possession provides the published operational reference for coding and reliability work; the programme’s published sequence sets out the wider argument and limits.
- Curatorial Context and Interpretation is a curatorial micro-study in development on access, framing and the accounts that follow an encounter. The public programme overview reports no completed participant study or findings.
Research tools and workspaces
Choose a documented instrument, or consult the tools directory to compare their purposes, procedures and limits.
- Critical language: Phenomenological Indices, Linguistic Diagnostics and Theory Prism.
- Encounter and curatorial conditions: Encounter Differential, Curatorial Space and Adjacency Mapper.
- Historical comparison: Spatiotemporal Comparison.
- Documentary and curatorial evidence: Observatory · Curatorial/Museum Research.
Read the Observatory research documentation and Encounter Differential research documentation for their research questions, staged development and evidence limits. A documented procedure or constructed demonstration does not establish empirical validation.
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