Interactive

Reverse
Research Lab

Upload your work. Get mapped to adjacent thinkers, frameworks, and references you didn't know existed.

React Claude API Research Methodology

The Breakdown

Problem When I finished my MFA thesis, a body of photographic and installation work, I knew the references that had shaped my thinking. What I didn't know was where the work sat in a larger intellectual landscape. The connections I hadn't made yet. The thinkers, movements, and frameworks that were adjacent to my ideas but outside my field of vision.

Constraint Traditional research starts with the question and works toward the answer. But creative work often happens the other way around: you make something, and then you figure out what it's in conversation with. That reverse process, starting with the artifact and mapping outward, doesn't have a standard tool. You either have a well-read advisor or you spend months in a library.

Solution A tool where you upload or paste your work (an essay, a project description, a thesis excerpt, a campaign brief) and it maps you to adjacent thinkers, theoretical frameworks, artistic movements, and references across disciplines. It identifies the intellectual lineage you're working within, surfaces connections you may not have seen, and gives you a reading list that's specific to your work, not a generic syllabus.

What It Looks Like

halle.studio/lab

Reverse Research Lab

Start with your work. Map outward.

↑ Upload PDF, image, or paste text

My work examines the domestic interior as a site of self-construction, using photography and installation to explore how women perform identity within private spaces that are simultaneously stages and sanctuaries...

Map My Work

Input: upload a file or paste your work.

halle.studio/lab

Adjacent Thinkers

THEORY Gaston Bachelard — The Poetics of Space, phenomenology of intimate spaces

ART Francesca Woodman — self-portraiture, body as architectural element

SOCIOLOGY Erving Goffman — front stage / back stage performance of self

Surprise Connection

92% MATCH Your use of fabric as boundary maps directly to Christo & Jeanne-Claude's wrapped architecture. Neither of you is decorating; you're both making the invisible structure of a space suddenly visible.

Frameworks

LENS Feminist geography — gendered production of domestic space

LENS Material culture studies — objects as identity artifacts

Reading List

bell hooks, "Homeplace: A Site of Resistance"

Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea

Iris Marion Young, "House and Home"

Output: thinkers, frameworks, movements, reading list.

The Takeaway

Research isn't always about finding answers to questions you already have. Sometimes it's about discovering the questions your work is already asking. This tool reverses the standard research flow, start with the artifact, map outward, and the result is a kind of intellectual mirror. It's useful for artists, strategists, writers, and anyone whose work sits at an intersection they haven't fully mapped yet.

Try It Yourself →

AI-powered · Rate limited to 10 uses/day