Project Roadmap
Phase 1 — Foundation & Baselines Completed
Goal: Establish a scalable, interpretable foundation.
- Ingest and normalize ~200,000 Hacker News discussions (2024–2025)
- Design scalable ingestion and preprocessing pipelines
- Define nine core linguistic dimensions for analysis
- Train initial BERT-based models using a weakly supervised approach
- Establish analytical baselines and sanity checks
- Build initial visualizations for exploratory analysis
Outcome:
A working end-to-end system capable of processing and analyzing large language corpora with methodological transparency.
Phase 2 — Platform Extension & Interpretability In Progress
Goal: Expand data coverage and improve interpretability and usability.
Platform Enhancements
- Integrate Reddit discussion feeds (2024–January 2026)
- Introduce dimensional banding to support interpretation at both topic and dimension levels (by end of January 2026)
User Experience Enhancements
- Add dynamic time slicing for longitudinal exploration (by January 10)
- Introduce blockchain acknowledgment tracking (by January 20)
Outcome:
Expanded corpus coverage and improved interpretability, enabling clearer analysis of temporal and topical language shifts.
Phase 3 — Analytical Expansion Planned
Goal: Broaden analytical depth without sacrificing clarity.
- Add additional linguistic dimensions as warranted by observed patterns (by end of February 2026)
- Explore alternative embedding and classifier architectures for comparison (January–April 2026)
- Introduce comparative baselines across sub-communities or topics (January–April 2026)
- Expand temporal analysis to finer-grained resolution (by end of March 2026)
- Improve visualization tooling for multi-dimensional exploration (by end of April 2026)
Outcome:
A richer analytical surface area while preserving interpretability and methodological discipline.
Phase 4 — Scalability & Generalization Planned
Goal: Stress-test architectural and methodological scalability.
- Extend pipelines to support additional public-language corpora (by end of June 2026)
- Validate performance and cost characteristics at larger data volumes (by end of June 2026)
- Modularize pipelines to enable easier corpus substitution (by end of March 2026)
- Document tradeoffs between model complexity and interpretability (by end of June 2026)
Outcome:
Demonstrated architectural scalability and corpus-agnostic system design.
Phase 5 — Synthesis & Documentation Ongoing
Goal: Make the work legible to others without overselling conclusions.
- Produce written analyses describing observed language dynamics
- Document methodological decisions, assumptions, and known limitations
- Maintain a running log of revisions, failures, and design tradeoffs
- Surface open questions and areas for future exploration
Outcome:
A transparent research artifact that emphasizes process, judgment, and iteration over prediction.