A research map
How work gets passed down, and what changes on the way
Artists absorb things and then change them. This site tracks what travelled between specific works, where it landed, and what was different when it arrived. Start anywhere and keep following the evidence.
Start here
The deepest material is the line running from NewsRadio into Community. Both have full pages of their own, and the same connection reads correctly from either side.
Community 2009–2015
A study group at Greendale Community College. The project's centre of gravity: the show most often doing the inheriting.
NewsRadio 1995–1999
The WNYX newsroom. The project's main documented ancestor, and a complete work in its own right rather than a source list.
evermore 2020
Carries “right where you left me,” the first of the two hairpin substitutions.
Midnights 2022
Carries “The Great War,” the second hairpin substitution.
The clearest demonstration
Johnny Johnson's takeover and Chang's First Dynasty aligns 16 beats across two institutional coups, each one inspectable on its own. NewsRadio replaces offices and titles. Community puts another body in the chair. Two beats are left unmatched on purpose, because the research has not found a counterpart and a mirror that hides its gaps is not inspectable.
How a claim is graded
Nothing here gets a confidence percentage. Each record carries a research state grounded in what the source situation actually supports, and the wording the original research document used is kept on the record.
A rejected candidate stays on the site. A method that can only produce hits is not a method. Read the full standard.
What is in the corpus right now
| Works | 12 | television, music, and journalism |
|---|---|---|
| Units | 209 | 207 episodes with a parsed script, plus songs |
| Connections | 51 | every one typed, directional, and carrying its own research state |
| Mirrors | 3 | 16 aligned beats |
| Motifs | 9 | recurring mechanisms with their own chronology |
| Evidence packets | 7 | 25 items, each saying what it actually proves |
This is a first vertical slice built from the project’s existing research documents, not a finished catalogue. Its point is that the whole path works end to end: a work, an episode, an exact line, an annotation, a typed connection, the other side’s exact line, an evidence packet, and the graph.