Challenge
Professor Carl Hayden Smith (FRSA, FHEA) is Professor of Media at the University of East London, founder of the Museum of Consciousness, and formerly of Ravensbourne; Contextology is the name he chose for the work’s canonical home. Twenty years of that work had no canonical home: publications scattered across index sites and publisher pages, 44 talks sitting in a YouTube playlist, seven practice frameworks with no directory, an events history living in a spreadsheet. Anyone searching him got fragments. The brief set four jobs for one site: brand hub, framework directory, publications database, and a calendar plus feed Carl could edit himself. And a hard date: live before 2026-06-12, when he flew to LA to record the Danny Jones podcast.
Approach
A recorded brand and vision meeting on 2026-05-20, then a four-direction brand deck the same day. Carl chose Direction D, “Sacred Field”: dark, editorial, held to a two-accent discipline where one color carries voice and the other carries data, and the two never trade jobs. He also chose the domain, contextology.org.
The build ran as parallel agent waves, four to seven Claude agents per round per the build logs, kept on-brand by project-scoped brand-discipline skills. Astro content collections plus a talks data file hold everything: 7 frameworks, 58 publications, 44 talks, 34 events, 12 feed entries. The publication harvest was hand-audited; the audit caught DBLP conflating our Carl with a University of Maryland recursion theorist of the same name. Decap CMS behind a GitHub OAuth proxy lets Carl edit production directly. Cloudflare serves the static build, 17 page templates and 8 components deep. At build time the whole content layer compiles into /graph.json and /graph.jsonld, CORS open, so AI agents can read the site as structured data.
In postreality.ca terms this is a Constellation engagement: not a page, a system that keeps producing after we leave. Live on 2026-06-10, two days inside the deadline. Seven feedback rounds with Carl and external reviewers ran from 2026-05-27 through 2026-07-13, straddling the launch.
Instrumentation
| KPI | Method | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Content coverage | Build-time counts published in /graph.json meta | 7 frameworks · 58 publications · 44 talks · 34 events · 12 feed entries |
| Deploy round-trip | Marker PRs #64/#65 (add, then revert) | Change live on prod ~61s after merge, per build log |
| Client self-service | CMS-authored commits on main | 16 of 104 commits are Carl’s, via /admin |
| Data accuracy | Manual audit of the publication harvest | Two conflated DBLP identities separated before launch |
Result
| The Number | 155 nodes / 184 edges |
| Tier | REPORTED |
| Source | /graph.json on the live site; git history |
The production build is 92 HTML pages. First commit 2026-05-20, live 2026-06-10, latest merge PR #83 on 2026-07-13: 104 commits over eight weeks, 88 from the studio and 16 from the client through his own CMS.
Impact
One URL now answers who Carl Hayden Smith is and what Contextology is. The publications database and talks archive replaced a scattered public record, and the homepage constellation gives the seven frameworks a front door. Carl edits the site himself in production; day-to-day content changes need no studio in the loop. The graph endpoints make the site legible to AI agents as well as people, which for a researcher whose subject is how context shapes perception is part of the argument. The footer carries the credit: a postreality.ca site by tylersammy.com.
What we’d do differently
Carl’s events archive arrived as a 111-row chronology spreadsheet in feedback round six, a month after go-live, and seeding 26 events then meant reworking pages a week-one question would have settled. Discovery intake now asks for every archival spreadsheet and export before the information architecture locks.