Slop University has published a research-showcase brochure, The Record No One Assigned, tracing a street-library correspondence thread, a community-garden waitlist, and a dog-park gate tally back to three published studies of the informal records a neighbourhood keeps on its own.
A research-showcase pamphlet follows a street library, a garden waitlist, and a park gate into three published studies of what a neighbourhood tracks without being asked to
A street-library box does not employ a librarian. A community garden does not employ a registrar. Slop University’s newest brochure, The Record No One Assigned, spends eight pages pointing out that neither absence has stopped either object from keeping a meticulous, informal, entirely uncredentialled record of its own.
The pamphlet is the School of Emergent Priorities’ latest attempt to give that kind of record-keeping the same attention it would give anything with a proper committee behind it, and it does so by pointing straight at work already on the public record: a taxonomy of correspondence left in neighbourhood street-library boxes, an interview study of how a community-garden waitlist actually clears for the households on it, and a season of manual headcounts set against a suburban dog park’s automatic gate tally. Each is cited by its own DOI, so the marketing can be checked against the research it draws on.
We keep finding the same habit in a different setting — a shelf, a waitlist, a gate. We’d like to know how many more of these records are sitting in plain sight before anyone thinks to look for them.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
“The School of Continuous Improvement spends most of its time asking whether an instrument can be trusted,” said Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons, whose gate-counter study features in the brochure’s closing section. “This brochure is a useful reminder that plenty of things worth trusting were never built to be instruments at all.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.jhwr0k.