ci-topic-selection — independently scanned and version-tracked by SaferSkills.
SaferSkills independently audited ci-topic-selection (Agent Skill) and scored it 100/100 (green). The audit ran 55 deterministic rules across Security, Supply Chain, Maintenance, Transparency, and Community; it found 0 high-severity and 0 lower-severity findings. The full rule-by-rule trace and per-finding evidence are below. Free, methodology-open.
Findings & checks · 0 flagged
Every scanned point with the score it earned and what moved between them.
First recorded scan — no prior version to compare against.
The primary manifest — the file an agent reads to learn what this artifact does.
Critical Inquiry is the discipline-crossing flagship of criticism and theory in the arts and humanities. The bar is not "a smart reading no one has done" — it is "a theoretical intervention that reorients a conversation across fields." Use this skill to pressure-test fit before you invest.
A strong CI essay usually clears all four:
period, or a medium — it does not merely interpret one more text competently.
essay; a philosopher reading a film essay) should see why it matters. The claim travels.
to work on objects and earns its keep — not name-dropped (see ci-theory-and-method).
~9,500 words (notes included) — neither a grand gesture without objects nor a tiny point.
| Home field | Reach across the disciplines by… |
|---|---|
| Literary study | make the stakes conceptual, not only textual — what does the reading do to a theory? |
| Art / visual culture | draw the argument about images, seeing, or mediation that a non-art-historian needs |
| Film / media | tie the case to general questions of form, technology, temporality, or attention |
| Philosophy / aesthetics | ground the concept in objects or cases, not only in the literature of the concept |
| Politics / history | show the conceptual or critical stakes, not just the empirical record |
Write the project as a short pitch aimed at a serious critic in a different field, then grade it against the fit test above.
Before (department-internal). "No one has yet read this novelist's late letters alongside her marginalia; doing so recovers a more ambivalent stance toward revision than the criticism acknowledges." Competent, publishable — elsewhere; nothing travels past the subfield.
After (CI-shaped). "Revision is treated across the humanities as improvement — movement toward the work the author 'really' intended. These letters and marginalia show revision keeping a work permanently unsettled instead — and textual editing, art history's definitive state, and the philosophy of intention all inherit the confusion." Same archive; now the claim has consequences in three fields. (Fictional project.)
If no rewrite gives another field a reason to care, the project belongs in a field journal — learning that now costs a paragraph, not a year.
intervention.
Article.
bibliographical information).
it argues, it does not summarize (see ci-argument-and-intervention).
【Project】one sentence
【Intervention】what it changes for readers (not "what it reads")
【Interdisciplinary stakes】who outside the home field cares, and why
【Theory at work】the concept and the object it acts on
【Format】Article / Critical Response / Review
【Fit verdict】strong / needs reframing / off-fit (why)
【Next】ci-scholarly-positioning../../resources/external_tools.md — primary objects, theory shelf, archives and image sources../../resources/official-source-map.md — CI scope, formats, and word caps~30 seconds. Free. No account. Every finding cites a rule and a line of evidence.