A1 · Reading: room notes

Read each community on its own terms

Before looking for patterns across communities, the aggregator needs to understand what happened inside each one. A1 builds that familiarity and checks what the supplied evidence can support. In these guides, a community is one subreddit treated as a case; the run’s files call it a room.

Where this stage starts

Community coding has already produced concepts tied to participants’ words, themes that group those concepts, and a written account of each community. Reply trees preserve who answered whom. The aggregator receives this coded collection, not an untouched view of every Reddit post. Checking its coverage is therefore part of the analysis.

What the aggregator does

First, the aggregator checks the package: whether files and counts agree, dates make sense, and missing material or work on other platforms could change an interpretation. A community that tried and failed to organize is still informative. Excluding it simply because it made no lasting artwork would hide part of the phenomenon.

The aggregator declares a reading order and expectations before reading each community as a whole. Participants’ words come before the community coder’s account; canvas information comes last. This order helps distinguish what the record shows from an interpretation already supplied by another agent.

Each community gets a note about its aims, sequence of events, uncertainties and last observed coordination. Notes preserve context for later work but do not replace source evidence. A later claim must still point back to the underlying material. Silence at the end of a thread does not establish that organizing ended everywhere, especially when members moved to another platform.

What the next stage receives

B1 receives an informed reading of the communities, a declared analysis set, and recorded uncertainties. It can begin building categories that work across cases. A1 has not yet created that common scheme or a population model.