METHOD · VERSION 4.4
Show the evidence.
Label the uncertainty.
DOCUMENTED NORTH studies stories that sit near secrecy, intelligence and institutional failure. That makes visual drama easy — and evidentiary overreach dangerous. The method is designed to resist that.
01 / THREE SEPARATE STATES
Event, claim and editorial review are not the same thing.
What kind of record is this?
Intelligence operation, accident, official inquiry, secret programme, unresolved identity, institutional history or synthesis.
What can the file-level evidence carry?
Documented, substantiated, unresolved, contested, debunked or fringe. Individual claims may still have different statuses.
One allegation at a time.
A documented covert programme does not make a separate murder, sabotage or cover-up allegation true.
How far has the editorial work gone?
Research pending, sources collected, source checked, editorially reviewed or published. Publication is not proof.
02 / VISUAL EVIDENCE
Every image has a declared role.
Official document, wreck evidence or case material.
The visual comes directly from the event or an official investigative record.
An authentic object, person, vessel or aircraft.
Relevant to the case, but it may not prove the disputed claim.
Atmosphere with a boundary label.
A period street, town, harbour or landscape helps orientation. It must never be captioned as the crime scene if it is not.
Map, timeline, network or synthesis.
Designed by the archive to explain source relationships. It is interpretation, not a historical artefact.
Useful source, but not embedded.
Rights uncertainty or weak provenance keeps the image out of the visual layer.
No anonymous visual evidence.
Every embedded image carries a role, credit, licence and source. Core case assets are local; research-update context images may use a stable rights-cleared archive URL when the local asset has not yet been ingested.
03 / CONNECTIONS
The graph has grammar.
Direct documentary links, same-event subdossiers, institutional history, liaison context, strategic parallels and investigated-but-unsubstantiated claims are different edge types. The user can see the difference instead of receiving one visually seductive web of lines.
04 / THE RED THREAD
Real secrecy explains suspicion.
It does not validate it.
The strongest through-line across this archive is not a universal conspiracy. It is the documented existence of clandestine institutions, foreign liaison, Cold War surveillance and later public inquiries — alongside accidents, murders and unresolved events that attracted theories because secrecy was already part of the surrounding world.
THE METHOD HAS A NAME
SIGNAL / NOISE
DOCUMENTED NORTH uses SIGNAL / NOISE as its editorial evidence method. Primary records come first. Claims are labelled by what the record can support. Context is not converted into guilt, and an unresolved gap is shown as a gap rather than filled with inference.