About Lintel

Why the editor carries the name of a beam over a doorway.

The name

A lintel is the beam laid across the top of a doorway or window. It carries the weight above an opening, and it can do that only because each end rests on something solid. Take away either support and the lintel comes down.

A research finding works the same way. It spans the gap between what people said and what we conclude from it, and it stands only as long as the evidence under each end holds. Most analysis hides those supports once the report is written. Lintel keeps them in view, so anyone can see what a conclusion rests on, check it, and notice when a support is missing.

A lintel also marks a doorway. The board is a place people and software agents walk into together, to work on the same analysis with the same evidence in front of them.

Say it LIN-tl, like lentil with two letters swapped.

What the name promises

Every conclusion on a Lintel board can be traced down to the source it stands on. Evidence becomes observations, observations form patterns, and patterns support or contradict candidate findings. Each decision along the way travels with the name of whoever made it and the moment they made it.

The name is plain on purpose. It describes a structure, not a feeling, and it makes one claim the editor has to live up to: nothing on the board floats free of what holds it up.

ops.how

ops.how is the home of Lintel. This site explains the project, and the editor itself runs at method.ops.how. Public boards publish a readable page of their own, so a finished analysis can be shared and checked by people who were not in the room.

Who builds it

Lintel is built and maintained by George Jensen to support his own methodology work in qualitative research. It is non-commercial research tooling, in early development.

The Lintel mark is Dolmen by Marta Marinho, from the Noun Project, used under CC BY 3.0.