Terms used on this site
The words this site uses, as the paper and the instrument's contract define them. The agents' own files sometimes use older words; where they differ, the older word is given.
The study
Community. One subreddit studied as a case: its members, the artworks it built and what its members wrote during the event and the day after. The agents' files keep the run's own words: a community is a room, an artwork a mark, the aggregator the analyst and the community coder the case lead.
Dataset. The public record of the event: pixel changes, posts and comments. It is frozen.
Instrument. The harness in which agents read the dataset, with its contracts, stages and checks. It can change; later runs are judged by what they add.
Run. One use of the instrument from stage A1 to E2.
This site shows the run claude-v43-1, often written
v43.
The agents
Community coder. The agent that reads one community's full record and codes its organizing. It writes the first two layers of coding and the community's case account. For a large community, fleet coders read batches of threads for it, in the community coder's own model.
Fleet. A group of agents that divides one task. The community coders' fleets ran in their coders' model, gpt-5.6-sol; the aggregator's fleet, the independent readers who placed every second-order theme in its scheme, ran on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash.
Aggregator. The agent that composes the coded communities into the population model. It builds the last three layers of coding, the model and the organizational forms.
Field agent. A separate agent that reads the central r/place subreddit. At stage C4 it supplied an interim reading; its own analysis is unfinished.
Handler. Opens and closes the stages in order and checks what they deliver. The agents it runs do the analysis; the interpretation stays with the authors.
Layers of coding
The ladder is the five layers from quote to aggregate dimension. Construction runs upward.
| Layer | What it is | Written by |
|---|---|---|
| T1 first-order codes | members' words, coded, with the quote | community coder |
| T2 second-order themes | one community's concepts consolidated within the case | community coder |
| T3 third-order themes | kinds of second-order theme across communities, in the material's words | aggregator |
| T4 fourth-order themes | named groups of third-order themes; constructs | aggregator |
| Aggregate dimensions, D01 to D08 | what the fourth-order themes are about; constructs | aggregator |
Findings
Population model. The aggregator's qualitative model of the 705 curated communities: its parts, arrows and account.
Organizational forms. The six groups A to F into which the aggregator clustered the communities by their changes to the model and their codes. It chose six over four and eight.
Return. The model goes back to every community coder, who answers with its community's record (stage D2); the revised model goes back again (D3).
Running the instrument
Stage. One step of the run, A1 to E2, with its own card and outputs. A stage is one or more legs.
Leg. One launch of an agent within a stage.
Handback. The file in which a stage records what it needs, what is wrong with the instrument and its close.
Checkpoint. A leg closed at a named point, saved and resumable.
Checkpoint interview. A conversation with a saved agent restored at a checkpoint. It answers from the state it held then.