Compositional Defiguration: A Methodology for Measuring Public-Surface Visibility of Scholarly Corpora 0. Status declaration

Compositional Defiguration is the founding specification of the Surface Weather Station, an MMRS instrument for measuring how a scholarly corpus appears across search engines, AI summaries, indexes, mirrors, and other public composition surfaces.

The method begins from an expected figure for each tracked object: its name, provenance, definition, hierarchy, canonical anchor, and essential relations. It then compares that figure with what the public surface returns. The difference is not treated as a single question of whether a page is indexed. It is decomposed into five signals:

• Visibility — whether the object can be retrieved;
• Anchor Alignment — whether the visible result points to the current authoritative source;
• Figural Integrity — how much of the object’s conceptual topology survives;
• Compositional Lift — whether the object appears only when named or also when the broader problem is asked;
• Redundant Substrate Breadth — how many genuinely independent surfaces can reconstruct it.

From these signals the specification derives Link Fade, Ghost Survival, Compositional Defiguration, Compositional Bystanding, Composition Eligibility, and the Scale Drift Index.

The instrument distinguishes a work that is absent from one that is visible but distorted, a concept that survives through dead anchors from one installed in current custody, and exact-string retrieval from genuine field-level adoption. It also introduces three enduring diagnostics: successor-anchor lag, chronological smear, and source-hierarchy inversion.

Version 1.0 is the conceptual genesis of a measurement system later calibrated through multiple substrates and repeated scans. It transforms public visibility from anecdote into an inspectable research object.