  Real-time measurements are becoming feasible in cosmology, where the next
generation of telescopes will detect the temporal change of redshifts and sky
positions of individual sources with a precision that will allow a direct
detection of the cosmic expansion rate. These detections of cosmic drifts of
redshifts and positions are likely to become cornerstones in modern cosmology,
where one has otherwise relied on the indirect inference of cosmic expansion by
estimation of the slope of the fitted distance-redshift relation. Because of
their ability to directly detect the cosmic time-evolution, real-time
measurements are powerful as model-independent probes. We develop a
cosmographic framework for analysing cosmological redshift drift and position
drift signals without knowledge of the space-time geometry. The framework can
be applied to analyse data from surveys such as the Gaia observatory, the
Square Kilometer Array (SKA), and the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). The
drift effects are distorted by the regional kinematics and tidal effects in the
cosmic neighbourhood of the observer, giving rise to non-trivial corrections to
the well known Friedmann-Lema\^{\i}tre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) results. We
discuss how one may concretely implement the framework in the statistical
analysis of real-time data, along with assumptions and limitations that come
with such an analysis. We also discuss the geometrical information that can
ideally be extracted from ideal high-resolution data of cosmic drifts in
combination with distance-redshift data.
