Milestone 3: Your evidence base
This milestone chapter is part of a book in active development and has not yet been through the author’s review. Content may change as the review advances.
This chapter closes Studio 3: Ground it in verified evidence. Its lessons each ended at It is your turn; what you wrote there arrives here as working material, and this is where the pieces become one artifact you can defend.
What this milestone produces. An evidence registry of verified sources, your search log, an evidence map, and an explicit revision of your Studio 2 declaration.
What you bring
You also carry forward the last milestone’s artifact: Milestone 2: Your rules and your question. This one builds on it, and the chain assumes it is versioned and filed.
Check you are carrying each of these before you start. If one is missing, go back and work that lesson’s It is your turn first; the practice below assumes it.
- Lesson 8 — Research Builds on Research: your candidate source list with a status column, seeded by your own search, an AI sweep, and hand snowballing, with a lead source marked.
- Lesson 9 — Finding and Verifying Prior Evidence: your verified sources, your evidence map with its quiet spot, your gap written as one bounded sentence, and your revised declaration — or the defended reason it holds.
The practice
- Search deliberately and log every search: where you looked, what terms, what you found and did not.
- Verify each source you intend to cite by retrieving and reading it, never by trusting a summary.
- Build the evidence map: what is settled, what is contested, what is missing.
- Write the revision: how your question changed, or a defended statement of why it did not.
A version, not a pass
Your milestone artifact is a dated, numbered version with the reason for the version attached. When later evidence changes it, you write the next version rather than editing the last one, because the sequence of changes is itself part of your research record.
The four rails, here
Four concerns cross every studio in this book. At this milestone they take these specific forms.
- Ethics, permissions, and data exposure. Record the licence and terms of any dataset you found here, before you plan to use it.
- Evidence, provenance, and reproducibility. This studio IS the evidence rail’s home; every later citation traces to this registry.
- AI activity, verification, and human decisions. Every AI-suggested source is unverified until you have opened it yourself.
- Uncertainty, claim boundary, and revision history. Note where the literature disagrees; that disagreement is uncertainty you inherit.
Where this milestone sits
You arrived carrying Milestone 2: Your rules and your question. Milestone 4 takes your revised question and the gap your evidence map exposed, and writes them into a research contract that can be diagnosed. The chain ends at Milestone 12: Your release and next cycle, where you decide whether your finished research artifact leaves your hands.
What sends you back
New evidence found at any later studio is registered here, not appended informally to a draft.
How this milestone is assessed
Each row scores 0, 1, or 2. 10 points total.
| # | Criterion | 0 | 1 | 2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The milestone artifact exists in full, specific to your own project | absent, or generic text that would fit any project | present but incomplete, or specific in some parts and generic in others | complete and unmistakably about your project |
| 2 | The milestone is written as a dated, numbered version with its reason | no version, or a version with no reason given | versioned, but the reason is decorative rather than an account of what changed | versioned with a reason a reader could use to reconstruct your thinking |
| 3 | Every judgment in the artifact is defended by you, not asserted by a tool | conclusions appear with no reasoning, or reproduce a tool’s wording | reasoning present but thin where the decision was hardest | each judgment carries a reason you could defend under questioning |
| 4 | The four rails are carried in the form this studio requires | one or more rails absent where this studio required them | all rails present but one is nominal | every rail addressed in the form this studio requires |
| 5 | The milestone’s own product is present and defensible: An evidence registry of verified sources, your search log, an evidence map, and an explicit revision of your Studio 2 declaration | the milestone’s own product is missing | present but would not survive a careful question | present and defensible as stated |
Your workbook
Open the workbook with the badge above. It walks these steps with a cell for each one, ends by writing your milestone version with its reason, and adds the rows this studio contributes to your AI Research Ledger and your Research Dossier.