Every story is a journey. Follow it wherever it leads — the paper, the conference, the exhibit hall.
Governed research from the field to every stage it deserves. The journeys of migration, displacement, and survival — captured with rigor, able to show their work, and told with care.
Built for: · · · ·
Scroll ↓02 / 11 · See it
Research that shows its work.
Seven items. Four were sealed on the phone at the shutter, carrying position and time; three were filmed on a second camera that records no position, and say so above. Nothing was staged for this page.
Yorktown, Virginia · 5 September 2026. Four clips and three photographs, each shown with exactly what the record holds for it — no more. The day opens on the clock check, because the times you read afterwards are only worth what that check is worth.
03 / 11 · The field
A researcher with a phone becomes a rigorous field unit. Here is one real session — Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown, September 2026 — at three moments in a day.
The research plan travels into the field. Twelve places, twenty-six scenes, a hundred and twenty things asked for — carried onto the phone, working with no signal at all.
The researcher doesn’t carry a checklist — the research plan travels with them. Every frame is sealed at the shutter: hashed, located, timestamped and signed the moment it is made. When a moment outruns the app, one tap records the intent and the file is matched that evening.
Before you leave Yorktown, AutoStoryteller knows what the research plan still needs. The day is verified, taken into custody, and measured against the plan — while the site is still reachable.
Capture correctly when possible. Detect problems while they can still be corrected. Preserve the original. Never silently alter the historical record.
These are faithful recreations of the real interfaces — the studio’s own type, spacing and grammar — carrying figures read out of the live record on 6 September 2026. They are drawings of the software, not screenshots of it.
04 / 11 · The scan
On 5 September a researcher scanned the museum’s plaster Washington in the galleries at Yorktown — one act, on a phone, in a working museum. It is a cast taken by William Hubard from moulds made directly off Houdon’s marble. This is that scan, and the number beside it is the point: the export carries metric scale — and a scale is something you can check.
Why that word is earned — and how to check it. A pass with no recoverable scale is a picture of a shape, not a measurement of one — the record may only call that generative. This one carries its scale. Check it: the Association for Public Art publishes the Washington Square bronze, cast from the same Houdon original, at 6 ft 7½ in — 2.019 m. This scan’s box is 2.044 m: 1.2% over, and over the way a plaster cast should sit, since bronze shrinks as it cools and plaster barely does. Not yet checked: the export was cropped and no tape has touched this object — corroboration, not verification.
A scan is one act and several files. Each export carries a role read from its format, and the same act may be admitted as many times as it produced files — the same bytes twice are still refused.
And this one is a derivative. The export it came from is held unaltered; what you are turning has had its stray room-geometry removed and its texture reduced to travel. That is a presentation copy, and saying so is the whole idea.
05 / 11 · The descent
A story is only worth as much as what sits under it. Open each layer and go down — from the sentence a visitor reads to the file that was sealed on a phone at Jamestown.
Three of these five layers run today. The two above them are where the work is going. A page arguing that research should show its work has to show its own.
06 / 11 · The studios
Research travels from the field to its audiences through five connected studios — each a workspace of its own, none subordinate to another. Open any studio to see what it does, and the AI team that works inside it.
Each one says where it actually is. One of the five runs today and has been used on real fieldwork; the rest are architecture, some decided and some still being designed. This site labels its own claims the way the platform labels its evidence — it would be a poor argument for provenance that quietly overstated itself.
Capture where the story happened — sealed, located, even offline.
highlightsBring the scholarly record in — screened, reviewed, reconciled.
highlightsEstablish what's known. Sources become knowledge through review.
highlightsExplore the whole record — proposed, never assumed.
highlightsEstablished knowledge, staged for every audience.
highlightsEvery studio is staffed by governed AI agents with explicit, bounded authority — what each may do, may propose, and may never do is written down and enforced. Agents propose; people establish.
Publication · Repository · Federation · Administration — identity, custody, policy, and audit, kept accountable across all of it.
07 / 11 · The record
From one governed record, every destination: the journal paper, the conference talk, the book that retells a dissertation as the story of its discovery, the museum exhibit, the living map an audience can walk through. Every claim traceable to the evidence behind it — and every institution publishing under its own name.
Uncertainty is a state, not a failure. Of the 26 scenes planned at Colonial Williamsburg, 10 carry an observed position — taken on the ground — and 16 say plainly that theirs is only suggested. The map draws those differently, and nothing quietly promotes one into the other — a position reconstructed after the fact can never be recorded as one taken on the ground.
08 / 11 · The machine
Every agent works inside written, enforced limits — what it may do, what it may propose, and what it may never do. Nothing an agent produces enters the record as fact because it sounded confident.
Agents propose; people establish. Confirming a machine’s sentence records who affirmed it — never that a person wrote it.
09 / 11 · The trust
Testimony of displacement, deportation, and genocide is entrusted, not owned. Evidence is sealed the moment it is captured, and every transfer extends a verifiable chain of custody. Nothing corrects an original — a correction is a new thing that remembers what it came from.
And the story belongs to the people in it. Communities hold authority over their own cultural material — an authority no institution can grant, hold, or withdraw. Provenance travels with every record, and an institution’s knowledge is never locked in or held hostage.
10 / 11 · For you
Govern your researchers and your data with your own rules — and share on your own terms.
11 / 11 · The invitation
One studio of the five runs today, and it has been used on real fieldwork — a plan carried into the field, a day taken into custody that evening, and a scan that came back at full size. The rest is being built against architecture that is written down and argued in the open. If you steward a collection with a journey worth following — or research worth proving — we’d like to hear from you while it is still being shaped.
✎ info@autostoryteller.com⤓ The brief (PDF) ⤓ For researchers (PDF)
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