formulating-research-question SKILL.md skillA
formulating-research-question from icerain-cmd/humanities-superpowers is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.
mdr add icerain-cmd/humanities-superpowers/formulating-research-question@v2.1.0Pins v2.1.0 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.
- Audit grade
- A, 17 of 17 checks passed
- Kind
- SKILL.md skill
- Repository
- icerain-cmd/humanities-superpowers
- Path
skills/formulating-research-question/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 3
- Latest version
- v2.1.0, committed Sep 15, 2026
- First version recorded
- Jul 19, 2026
- Size
- 12,230 bytes
- Repository stars
- 21
- License
- MIT
Use when a humanities researcher has a broad topic, intuition, corpus, or problem but does not yet have a precise, contestable, and researchable question.
Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.
What the file says
# Formulating a Research Question ## Purpose Transform a broad topic or dissatisfaction into a contestable research question with an explicit object, unresolved tension, stakes, and feasible evidentiary path. This skill supports scholarly judgment; it does not manufacture novelty or decide what the researcher ought to value. ## Contract **Accepts** - A topic, corpus, archive, concept, event, medium, practice, or preliminary observation. - Notes describing what seems puzzling, inadequate, contradictory, or underexplained. - Optional disciplinary, temporal, linguistic, geographic, or institutional constraints. **Requires** - At least one identifiable research object or candidate corpus. - At least one unresolved tension stated without assuming its answer. - Enough information to distinguish the topic from the research problem. **Produces** - One `ResearchQuestion` record for the selected primary question. - Up to two subordinate questions. - A short research-problem statement. - A list of evidence classes required to answer the question. - A provisional hypothesis explicitly marked `hypothesis`. **May produce** - Two or three alternative question formulations with trade-offs. …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add icerain-cmd/humanities-superpowers/formulating-research-question@sha256:35099c8453de45ebThe line at the top of this page pins the label v2.1.0, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_v6tpnwbkx2rq6c4q)
2 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.
Versions
The registry has recorded 3 versions of this file, between Jul 19, 2026 and Sep 15, 2026, about one every 29 days.
| version | committed | commit | size | audit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| v2.1.0 latest | 2026-09-15 | 1bc2e1c | 12,230 B | A | view · diff |
| v2.0.0 | 2026-08-21 | 5d72da4 | 12,230 B | A | view · diff |
| v1.0.0 | 2026-07-19 | 262e1c6 | 10,570 B | A | view |
Audit of the latest version
- pass: Frontmatter block present
- pass: Frontmatter declares a name
- pass: Frontmatter declares a description
- pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (12230 bytes)
- pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
- pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
- pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
- pass: No credential-shaped string
- pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
- pass: No text hidden with inline styles
- pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
- pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
- pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
- pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
- pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
- pass: No link to a raw IP address
- pass: No script tag
Source
icerain-cmd/humanities-superpowers · 21 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-09-16 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_v6tpnwbkx2rq6c4q GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=icerain-cmd/humanities-superpowers/formulating-research-question GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/35099c8453de45eba9c28535a5f0fec1e9d9f37faaf8b267bc92ba5b328fa499
Your AI assistant does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.
Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.