The Microscope Analogy Imagine looking at a painting. Stand close, inches from the canvas and you see individual brushstrokes, texture, the physical application of paint. Step back a few feet, and you see the image: a face, a landscape, a composition. Step back further, across the room, and you see how the painting relates to its frame, the wall, the space it occupies. Step back outside the building, and the painting disappears entirely into the larger context of the museum, the city, the culture. Same painting. Different scales of observation. And at each scale, different features become visible while others disappear. The brushstrokes that dominated up close are invisible from across the room. The composition that emerged at medium distance fragments into meaningless marks up close. Neither view is "wrong". They're both accurate descriptions of what's observable at that scale. This is what scale means in contextual stratification: the resolution of observation, th...