The research direction has turned four times in ten months. Without a record that looks like drift; with one, it is a history.
The rule
A turn is a version bump, not a mess. Each entry records what changed and — more importantly — what the previous version could not account for, because that is the only part that stays useful once the direction has moved on again.
The current version is v4 — strangers, co-present bodies, and narrative meaning. It settled the split that the previous two versions were stuck in, and opened three new questions in doing so. All of it is on the page below, including the reasoning that v4 overturned, which is kept rather than deleted.