Promptotyping is an iterative, knowledge-driven method for developing project-specific digital research artefacts from structured research data and maintained project knowledge through Context Engineering and Agentic Engineering, organised around four recurrent forms of work (Preparation, Exploration, Distillation, Implementation). In the canonical repository convention, a knowledge/ folder holds versioned Knowledge Documents for requirements, data, decisions, and domain knowledge. This curated knowledge artefact guides implementation, persists across sessions, and receives consequential findings through write-back. The method also permits another inspectable and revisable documentary environment. A Critical Expert in the Loop verifies LLM output at defined points.
This repository is the public method portal and the repository of the method paper, which is written in research-artefacts/promptotyping-paper.md. The portal at https://dhcraft.org/Promptotyping/ integrates the specification, case evidence, tutorial, templates, canonical skill, and paper. It also serves the templates as stable, machine-readable addresses.
The four forms of work move from gathering raw material (Preparation) over probing what the data affords (Exploration) and distilling the findings into selective Markdown documents (Distillation) to iterative, verified development with an agentic coding tool (Implementation). Knowledge Document is the general term for a document of this kind, and it specialises into three types according to the kind of knowledge it holds, each with a diagnostic rule attached. Declarative Documents hold knowledge about the subject matter. Process Documents divide current handoff inputs, accepted future work, and the curated provenance index between handoff.md, plan.md, and journal.md. Action Documents, which the paper calls agent instruction documents, hold knowledge about how to act (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md); check these when output is formally wrong.
The full argument is the method paper; an overview is at dhcraft.org/Promptotyping/#overview.
Pollin, Christopher: Promptotyping. Translating Research Data into Research Artefacts through Context Engineering and Agentic Engineering (version 0.9.1, author-review draft, 22 August 2026; in preparation).
The complete current text is a single Markdown Research Artefact, research-artefacts/promptotyping-paper.md, written and revised in this repository. knowledge/paper-specification.md holds everything decided, checked, and still open about it, and the Grounded Vault under vault/ anchors its supporting claims in sources. The method portal renders the Research Artefact directly on its Paper page with an inline glossary.
The current repository state is version 0.9.1, an author-review draft of 22 August 2026. It incorporates the revisions made after the publicly circulated version 0.9 and establishes the baseline for complete sentence-level author review. Version 1.0 is reserved for a state in which the author has accepted every sentence in its paragraph and subsection context, the canonical terminology, the evidence and apparatus, the complete rendered text, and the release decision. The public review copy announced on 31 July 2026 remains version 0.9; its comments are evidence for revision and do not supersede the canonical repository text.
The open review round runs on the circulated version 0.9 copy, which serves as the external comment surface. The research artefact stays canonical. A reviewer comment becomes a change only through a recorded decision and an edit there. The author-review protocol and the current divergence between the two versions are recorded in knowledge/paper-specification.md.
Two introductions to the method (German): the methodology explainer Promptotyping, Teil 1 covering the four forms of work, the documents, and Critical Expert in the Loop, and the live demo Teil 2, building a functional dashboard from 76 Excel files with Claude Code.
| Content | Location | On the site |
|---|---|---|
| Method paper (English, version 0.9.1, author-review draft) | research-artefacts/promptotyping-paper.md, specification in knowledge/paper-specification.md | #paper |
| Evidence layer of the paper (Grounded Vault) | vault/ | #vault |
| Knowledge Document templates | _content/promptotyping-document/ | #vorlagen |
| Convention (naming contract, frontmatter schema, structure) | _content/konvention.md | #konvention-v0.1 |
| Technology baseline for static research tools (draft) | _content/technology-baseline.md | — |
| Curated case studies | data/case-studies.json, depth pages in _content/case-studies/ | #use-cases |
| Guided first iteration | _content/tutorial.md | #tutorial |
| Method extensions from practice | _content/praxis.md | #praxis |
| Canonical Promptotyping skill | skills/promptotyping/ | #skills-promptotyping |
| Reusable system prompts (coding, writing) | _content/skills/ | #skills |
| Glossary | data/glossar.json, _content/glossar.md | #glossar |
| Durable site knowledge base (self-application) | knowledge/ | — |
| Live Process Inbox | knowledge/handoff.md | — |
| Source material, including video scripts | source-material/ | — |
| Dated reports and transfer context | snapshots/, handoffs/ | — |
The templates of the catalogue structure the documents of a Promptotyping knowledge base. Each is addressable under a stable latest URL of the pattern https://dhcraft.org/Promptotyping/promptotyping-document/{slug} and readable as raw Markdown under the machine address pattern below. A template applies only when its trigger holds; a methods repository without data processing, like this one, skips data, and the reasoning is documented in its knowledge base.
| Slug | Function | Type |
|---|---|---|
| index | Navigation and glossary of the knowledge base | Declarative |
| project | Charter | Declarative |
| data | Material | Declarative |
| specification | Specification (requirements, decisions) | Declarative |
| user-stories | Specification (narrative scenarios) | Declarative |
| action-layer | Agent instructions (CLAUDE.md) |
Action |
| architecture | Architecture | Declarative |
| technology | Technology baseline for an artefact family | Action |
| domain-knowledge | Domain knowledge and reasoning layer | Declarative |
| design | Design | Declarative |
| testing | Quality assurance | Action |
| verification | Adversarial verification of claims | Declarative |
| journal | Provenance | Process |
| handoff | Process Inbox | Process |
| plan | Planning | Process |
| report | Reporting | Declarative (snapshot) |
| integration | Cross-project contracts | Declarative |
Template versions live in the mirrors' frontmatter and in data/promptotyping-documents.json, which is the catalogue this table follows.
The gallery at #use-cases curates publicly documented projects built with the method; each card links the project's GitHub repository and, where available, live demo and video. The underlying data is data/case-studies.json, and the cases marked there with deep_page carry a depth page under _content/case-studies/.
Repositories that apply the method declare which template a document follows in a template: frontmatter field:
template:
name: Vorlage Datengrundlage
version: <current template version, see data/promptotyping-documents.json>
url: https://dhcraft.org/Promptotyping/promptotyping-document/data
alias: https://dhcraft.org/Promptotyping/#promptotyping-document-dataThe url resolves in a browser via 404.html routing and requires JavaScript. For HTTP retrieval without JavaScript, the canonical machine address is the static Markdown file:
https://dhcraft.org/Promptotyping/_content/promptotyping-document/{slug}.md
.nojekyll in the repository root is required for GitHub Pages to publish _content/. Details in knowledge/specification.md (A4, A5, ADR-10).
The site is both specification and application of the method. The knowledge base in knowledge/ follows the templates the site publishes, each document carrying the template: field that points back to its own specification. The paper's supporting claims are anchored in the Grounded Vault under vault/, which links every claim to a source with provenance.
index.html single-shell entry for the method portal
404.html subpath-to-hash routing fallback
CLAUDE.md action layer of this repository (its own instance of the action-layer template)
.nojekyll required so GitHub Pages publishes _content/
knowledge/ knowledge base of the site itself
research-artefacts/ method paper
skills/ canonical Promptotyping skill
_content/ Markdown content (method pages, templates, case studies, glossary)
assets/ CSS, JS, vendored libraries, fonts, logo
data/ JSON data (case studies, glossary, template table)
vault/ Grounded Vault instance, evidence layer of the paper
No framework, no build step; marked.js and js-yaml are vendored. The reasoning is documented in the technology baseline.
git clone https://github.com/DigitalHumanitiesCraft/Promptotyping.git
cd Promptotyping
python -m http.server 8000Open http://localhost:8000. Development history is in knowledge/journal.md.
This is the repository of the method paper. Pollin, Christopher: Promptotyping. Translating Research Data into Research Artefacts through Context Engineering and Agentic Engineering (in preparation); the text is developed in research-artefacts/promptotyping-paper.md, its evidence layer in vault/.
For the repository and site: Pollin, Christopher; Steiner, Christian: Promptotyping. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14160875 (concept DOI, always resolves to the current version)
The method originates in the author's dissertation and was first published in blog form:
- Pollin, Christopher: Modelling, Operationalising and Exploring Historical Information. Using Historical Financial Sources as an Example. Dissertation, University of Graz 2025. https://unipub.uni-graz.at/obvugrhs/12127700
- Pollin, Christopher: Promptotyping. Von der Idee zur Anwendung. DHCraft Blog, 24.04.2025. https://dhcraft.org/excellence/blog/Promptotyping/
- Pollin, Christopher: Promptotyping. Zwischen Vibe Coding, Vibe Research und Context Engineering. Blogpost, L.I.S.A. Wissenschaftsportal der Gerda Henkel Stiftung, 17.01.2026. https://lisa.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/digitale_geschichte_pollin
Code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the Python tooling under vault/tools/) is licensed under the MIT License, see LICENSE. Content (Markdown under _content/, knowledge/, the Grounded Vault under vault/, and the prose texts of the site) is licensed under CC BY 4.0. The split follows the carrier; source that runs is MIT, text that is read is CC BY 4.0. This repository contains no third-party research data.