Instrument
The instrument turns the shared record of r/place into accounts that later studies can test and revise. It has three parts, run in order, each by its own handler: collection, community coding and aggregation. Each part takes the one before it as input and works under its own written instructions.
Collection
Gathers the public record once, then hashes and freezes every file. Scripts collect; the census judgments are ours.
Reddit's log of all 16,559,897 pixel changes, each with the placer's hashed name.
The 1,473 artworks of the finished canvas, their outlines and the subreddits they name.
Everything the placers wrote on Reddit in the 24 days around the canvas, and everything anyone wrote in 24,093 subreddits in those days. The study reads a narrower window, the event and the day after, for the 2,796 subreddits that took part in the event; the census keeps 705 of them as cases (from 2,796 to 705).
4 Pixels by artwork and by hour
Every pixel change inside each artwork's outline, and each community's area hour by hour.
Which subreddits count as cases. For the population model we started from the 777 subreddits the atlas credits with an artwork and kept 705 communities.
Collection · What it gave: the record
Community coding
One community coder per community reads its whole record and writes codes, themes and a case account, close to its members' words. It sees no other community. The coding handler prepares, launches and checks each coder; fleet coders help with the largest communities.
A brief writer's account of the community's ordinary week before the event, read for orientation; a claim with no quote behind it counts as unsupported.
The coder goes through the record in time order and decides, thread by thread, whether it touches the event; a thread that does is read in full.
One code per passage, close to the members' words and tied to its quote.
The coder groups the codes into second-order themes by asking what these people are doing; each code sits in one theme.
The chronology, what set off what, posts against comments, a counter-reading and saturation, each resting on the codes.
Community coding · What it gave: community coding
Aggregation
The aggregator reads the coders' sealed work, never the record. Over eighteen stages in six groups it builds layers of themes and one population model, returns the model to every community coder, revises it, and groups the communities into candidate organizational forms.
A note on each community before any common scheme is named.
A scheme of 197 third-order themes, tested by fresh readers, applied to all 7,844 second-order themes and settled where readers disagreed.
28 fourth-order themes, eight aggregate dimensions and the population model with its account.
The return. The model goes back to every community coder; the aggregator rules on each change and revises the model.
Communities that asked for similar changes form six candidate organizational forms; each form gets an account, and the model is retold with the forms inside it.
An audit of what the run supports, and a review of how the run was handled and what the next instrument should change.
Aggregation · What it gave: the population model
Versions
How the contracts came to their current versions, and how the population model changed during the run.
Run the study
How to run the study again: open a handler chat in Codex or Claude, give it the linked instructions, and run the three parts in order, each with its own handler. Its last item is the full reference: every document behind the run, in its original text.