A chart position is easy to read and easy to over-read. A song's rank in one country's store can be taken for the country's taste, a missing market for a market with no listeners, a rise in searches for a rise in liking. This short study asks how a public record designs questions about chart numbers before anyone answers them: what it asks a number to show, what material it names, and what it says the number may not be made to mean. It reads fifteen chart questions from Dionyas, the music studio of the RISCON family: every chart question in its list that is not linked to its foresight domain. Dionyas publishes its 1,539 inquiries as editorial question designs and states that it has generated no judgment on them; it does not say who drafted these fifteen. The records are in Korean and are read in a translation made for this study.
This study finds that each of the fifteen pairs its question with a boundary of its own that names one conversion the number may not undergo: into favour, nationality, absence, penetration, cause or contribution, or a creative decision. It calls this design a refused conversion. The questions about response keep holding back and further inquiry open beside acting, and several questions turn on the reader of the chart rather than on the artist. Read beside work on commensuration, quantification and the reactivity of public measures, the study reads these designs as incommensurability stated record by record, before any judgment.