Palimpsest is a practice-based research instrument that re-encodes coded interview material into animated visual form. It takes the categorised accounts of five artist-lecturers navigating institutional frameworks and renders them as fields of generative mark-making, driven by a Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion substrate. The instrument lets the researcher see how categories layer and recur across an interview, which a linear transcript flattens.
Each participant is represented by a distinct chromatic identity (hue) and reaction-diffusion pattern. Their interview data is segmented into thematic units coded against the constructivist grounded theory categories developed in the thesis. The visual parameters of each segment are set by the researcher as interpretive decisions, encoding qualities of the participant's described experience.
The background colour and stroke colour identify the participant. The organic patterning in the substrate comes from a reaction-diffusion simulation seeded per participant, giving each person a distinctive textural field that persists across their segments.
The stroke style (s-curve, wave, loop, zigzag) encodes the quality of movement in the described experience. The animation behaviour encodes temporal character: tension pulse for strain, spreading ripple for disseminating energy, suppressed drift for restraint. Amplitude maps to felt intensity. Cell size maps to the granularity of attention. Rotation maps to cyclicality or repetition.
The ghost layer accumulates traces of previous frames, creating a palimpsest effect - earlier states remain faintly visible beneath the current rendering, enacting the instrument's central metaphor of layered, partially-visible histories. The reaction-diffusion visualisation makes the recurrence of categories visible as a texture across the whole interview at once, a persistence that is easy to miss when reading sequentially but hard to miss when the whole interview is present on screen simultaneously.
Palimpsest worked on the coded material by re-encoding it into forms that could be seen rather than only read. It was through this instrument that the researcher noticed the same participant returning to the act of translation again and again without naming it, part of how protective translation came to be treated as central. The instrument is powerful for noticing and poor for proving: a striking pattern in the morphing states is a hypothesis about the coded data, not a finding about it, and the discipline of returning from the instrument to the coded data is part of using it well.
Building the instrument rather than adapting existing qualitative software meant the unit of analysis could be designed around what the data actually was - a coded segment held together with its visual correlate - rather than around what a generic tool expected a coded segment to look like. This is not a claim that bespoke tools are always superior. It is a narrower claim: that this data, arising from this kind of practice, needed an instrument built for it rather than one it had to be made to fit.
Editor: full interface for composing and adjusting segments.
Solo: plays through all participants sequentially with transport controls.
Comparative: two participants or segments side by side or layered.
Present: full canvas with persistent caption bar, for guided presentation.
Exhibition: kiosk mode for unattended display, with touch navigation.
This instrument is one of three research instruments developed as part of a practice-based PhD examining how artist-lecturers navigate Bologna Process soft governance in art and design higher education. The central theoretical contribution is protective translation - the mid-range grounded theory describing how practitioners manage the relationship between studio practice and institutional documentation frameworks.
The study contributes new knowledge on three justifications kept distinct throughout: naming protective translation as the specific form the artist-lecturer condition takes under Bologna, demonstrating a composite practice-based method capable of reaching it, and deepening, through made work, an understanding of that condition that argument alone leaves cold.
The visual coding system is discussed in Chapter 5 (§5.3) of the thesis. The Visual Codebook export documents the parameter rationale for each segment, connecting visual decisions to analytical categories and transcript evidence.
Instrument by Paul Gardiner, Limerick School of Art and Design / Queen's University Belfast.
| Parameter | Visual effect | Interpretive mapping |
|---|---|---|
| Chromatic hue | Background and stroke colour | Distinguishes participants visually. Each hue is a persistent identity marker across all segments. |
| RD preset | Organic substrate patterning | Sets the character of the reaction-diffusion field: spots, stripes, maze, coral, etc. Each pattern creates a distinctive textural ground that inflects all mark-making. |
| Parameter | Visual effect | Interpretive mapping |
|---|---|---|
| Style | Shape of individual marks | s-curve = flowing, continuous movement. wave = oscillation, back-and-forth. loop = containment, circularity. zigzag = tension, sharp redirections. |
| Cell size | Density of mark grid | Granularity of attention. Smaller cells = finer, more detailed texture. Larger cells = broader, more open gesture. |
| Amplitude | Size of stroke displacement | Felt intensity of the coded experience. Higher amplitude = greater expressive force. |
| Weight (min to max) | Stroke thickness range | Presence and pressure. Heavier strokes = more insistent, weighted. Lighter = more tentative, searching. |
| Rotation | Grid angle offset | Cyclicality or deviation from the expected orientation. |
| Gamma | Contrast curve of RD field | How sharply the substrate pattern modulates the marks. Higher gamma = starker contrast between patterned and open areas. |
| Invert | Reverses dark/light mapping | Shifts marks from clustering in pattern areas to clustering in open areas, or vice versa. |
| Behaviour | Motion quality | Interpretive mapping |
|---|---|---|
| Tension Pulse | Strokes expand and contract | Strain, frustration, pressure building and releasing |
| Suppressed Drift | Barely perceptible lateral movement | Held back, restrained, latent energy |
| Spreading Ripple | Ripples from centre outward | Energy disseminating, influence radiating |
| Slow Rotation | Entire grid rotates | Cycles, recurring patterns, the turning wheel |
| Flickering Tension | Left/right alternating emphasis | Two modes in conflict, oscillation between positions |
| Luminous Shimmer | Almost imperceptible shimmer | Aura, quiet presence, background awareness |
| Dreamy Phase | Cells phase in and out | The unconscious, half-formed, emerging |
| Hand Variation | Per-cell micro-drift | The handmade, edition variation, human irregularity |
| Perpetual Scroll | Scrolls upward continuously | Striving, unreachable horizon, continuous effort |
| Static | No animation | Fixed, resolved, settled |
| Layer | Effect | Interpretive mapping |
|---|---|---|
| Ghost layer | Fading trace of previous frames | Palimpsest: earlier states remain partially visible, enacting layered histories |
| Morph transition | Cross-fade between segments | Continuity within a participant's account |
| Fade-to-black | Full black between participants | Separation of voices, distinct perspectives |