Detectives for your docs.

Mission

Sub[text] is a network of archivists, librarians, artists, & producers. We link film & audio documentarians to the archives they didn’t know they needed. We’re adept at quick but thorough research, establishing meaningful relationships between the past & present.

Leave the deep dive to us—we’ll find out what you need to know to tell the story.

Services

Finding / retrieving archival materials

Literature / history review

Fact-checking

Locating potential interview subjects

Locating potential narrative subjects

Cold-calling / pre-interviewing

Interview prep

Sensitivity reading

Project planning

The Process

1. Fill out the contact form below. We’ll get in touch with our intake questionnaire—it takes about 20-30 minutes to fill out. After we review your detailed research needs, we’ll set up a Zoom meeting to get to know you and your project better.

2. We’ll work together to establish a timeline and fee for each service, depending on your budget and needs. Then: we’ll assign you a researcher and head into the weeds! 

3. When we emerge, we’ll provide you with a professional literature review of everything we were able to uncover (including links to source the materials yourself and notes about which materials require further licensing).

4. We’ll meet again to go over our findings with you in detail, answer questions, and talk about whether any follow-up research is necessary. 

Clients are free to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon any of the material provided in the research document in any medium or format, so long as appropriate licenses are obtained and credit for the research is given to Sub[text].

Get in touch

Tell us a bit about who you are and what kind of research you’re looking for — we’ll send you an intake questionnaire & get this party started.