The whole event
A finished image shows what remained. The event record lets us ask how people reached it: what they planned, changed, defended or abandoned. This is the lifecycle the repository holds in common.
From first placements to the finished canvas
The archived pixel record contains 16,559,897 placements, about 16.6 million. The study uses a 73-hour placement window, followed by another day for the written record. Together these traces let researchers return to earlier decisions and responses rather than infer the process from its final outcome alone. The data reference documents the pixel record; the census reference documents the study window.
The study follows 705 curated communities with evidence of coordination. Read how the population was defined and how the source records are collected.
The boundaries of observation
The whole event is not the whole life of each community. Groups existed before the canvas opened and could continue afterwards. Public records also leave gaps: coordination on Discord or other channels is not made visible by preserving Reddit and pixel data. A missing statement is not proof that an action or discussion did not occur.
A separate timeline for the research
The analysis has its own history: community coding, a population model, returns to cases, organizational forms and audits. Saved checkpoints preserve the analyst's conversation and matching files at those boundaries.
Follow the analysis stages, read the final account, or inspect a checkpoint. Interview replies are new explanations from a saved state, not transcripts of unspoken past reasoning.