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The Vela research program

What Vela's research program is, what threads it runs, where its methods generalize, and how to read further. The outside-reader one-pager — distinct from the internal twelve-RQ program plan.

Vela·Overview·source: people-analyst/vela/docs/research/OVERVIEW.md

title: "The Vela Research Program — Overview" description: "What Vela's research program is, what threads it runs, where its methods generalize, and how to read further." status: v1 publishedAt: 2026-04-29 authors: ["Mike West"] featured: true

v1 outside-reader one-pager. Distinct from RESEARCH-PROGRAM.md (the internal twelve-RQ program plan); this page is the entry point for someone arriving cold.

What Vela research is

Vela is a contemplative platform for fine-art figurative work. Beneath that surface, it is a measurement instrument. Every interaction — explicit rating, save, dwell, optional emotion tag, optional boundary flag — is recorded against a stable item descriptor and a stable subject descriptor, and the system accumulates a behavioural record that decomposes a single construct: desire, the forward-leaning impulse to remain with an image and seek more of its kind, distinguished from preference, the evaluative judgment that an image is good. Fine art is the testbed because the stimulus space is dense, culturally legible, and tractable to curate. The methods are general.

What we are studying

The program runs as parallel threads, each with its own literature review, BibTeX bibliography, and study queue, and each governed by a shared methodology.

  • The RQ program — twelve research questions across desire as a construct, the figurative feature model, temporal dynamics, individual differences, adaptive recommendation, computational aesthetics, and perceptual literacy. Specified in docs/RESEARCH-PROGRAM.md.
  • Christianity, sex, and shame — historical and empirical synthesis on the Western Christian tradition's relationship to embodiment and sexuality, with a draft theological-coherence intervention protocol. Five published papers; literature review and BibTeX live.
  • Text-aesthetic — the literature counterpart to the figurative thread: how do readers experience aesthetic response to sentences, and how does that map onto the visual instrument? Literature map + review + AESTHEMOS amendment published.
  • Boudoir Studios Program — research-only initiative on the contemporary boudoir-photography industry. Studio discovery + crawl + corpus of 9,336 studios across all 50 states; literature review, paper outlines, and methodology in place.
  • Artist studies — recurring per-artist arcs (Warhol, Klimt, Schiele, Sargent), each producing methods notes, a placement gallery, an editorial essay, and (where applicable) AI method studies routed through the derivative pipeline.
  • Museum diversity of beauty — comparative work on how the corpus of "beauty" curated by major museums varies across institutions, against local serving populations, and over time. Bootstrap thread; questions doc live, analysis queued.

The threads do not share a write-up format; they share a corpus pipeline, a scoring engine, and a release standard.

How we study it

The full methodology lives at docs/research/methodology.md. In one paragraph: an item-response architecture (RID/SID) lets the corpus accumulate response across studies and instrument iterations without confounding subject change with instrument change; the text corpus that feeds retrieval and editorial uses a deliberate two-grade pattern (curator-grade for editorial, research-bulk-grade for audit and retrieval — see docs/research/multi-faceted-vs-dual-grade.md); preregistration is the rule, not the exception.

What is published

Live entries on the research surface, organised by thread:

  • RQ program — rq1-desire-vs-preference, rq2-compositional-features, rq3-temporal-dynamics, rq4-individual-differences; cross-thread literature-review; desire-index-vol1-analysis.
  • Christianity, sex, and shame — christianity-sex-shame-literature-review, christianity-sex-shame-public-introduction, christianity-sex-hangup, christianity-reinterpretation-pattern, augustine-across-his-works; theological-coherence-intervention-v0-1 protocol.
  • Text-aesthetic — text-aesthetic-literature-review, text-aesthetic-public-introduction, text-aesthetic-literature-map, text-aesthetic-bibliography-bibtex.
  • Boudoir Studios Program — boudoir-studios-program-proposal, boudoir-studios-program-literature-review, boudoir-studios-program-paper-outlines, boudoir-studios-program-methodology; crawl + inventory protocols.
  • Artist studies — warhol-methods, klimt-methods, schiele-methods, sargent-methods.
  • Museum diversity of beauty — museum-diversity-of-beauty-research-questions (this thread's bootstrap doc; the analysis is queued).
  • Cross-cutting — methodology, pipeline-status, multi-faceted-vs-dual-grade, emotion-corpus-expansion-2026-04, downstream-strategy-2026-04-24, thesis-readiness, proposed-studies, study-01 preregistration, bibliography-bibtex, literature-map.

What is next

Live tracking lives at docs/research/PIPELINE_STATUS.md. In one sentence: bulk corpus ingest (ASN-665) finishes feeding retrieval; the museum-diversity sub-question (a) analysis runs against a preregistered protocol; recruitment scales the participant base past the neutral-prior corpus floor flagged in the 2026-04-24 instrument-validation snapshot.

Where it generalizes

The instrument is general. The same architecture answers:

  • Consumer-behaviour research — taste calibration in any high-volume domain (clothing, fragrance, dating-profile selection, candidate photographs, restaurant menus, music libraries) needs the desire/preference separation.
  • Aesthetic-measurement methodology — replacing one-shot Likert with adaptive, profile-anchored measurement is a method change that earns evidence here and ports cleanly to typography, design, architecture, film.
  • Adaptive-measurement design outside HR — the principal-issues thesis says every domain has a load-bearing measurement set; Vela operationalises that thesis on figurative response. Educational diagnostics, product research, attitudinal surveys, and mental-health screening all sit on the same architectural backbone.
  • Computational humanities — the corpus-as-instrument frame ("a museum's collection is itself a measurement of cultural taste over time") is the museum-diversity thread's spine and applies to literary canons, film archives, and music libraries.

How to read further

Start with the Methodology doc for the instrument frame, the Pipeline status for the current state, and any thread's literature review for field positioning. Correspondence: mike@peopleanalyst.com.