The Office of Research Outputs awards its Deposit of the Quarter Prize to Dr Petra Umbile, for a repository deposit that documented which of its transcribed honour board names the painted board had already got wrong.
The Office of Research Outputs awards Dr Petra Umbile for a deposit whose data dictionary separates a signwriter's misspelling from a transcriber's across 4,918 painted honour board entries
A signwriter lettering a hall’s honour board in 1974 put one L in a life member’s surname. The University’s research repository now holds both spellings, and a note saying which belongs to the wall and which to the person.
The Office of Research Outputs has awarded its Deposit of the Quarter Prize to Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities, for the deposit lodged behind The Wall Runs Out First. The paper transcribes 4,918 entries from 121 painted boards across 68 volunteer-run halls; the deposit’s data dictionary marks, for each one, whether the transcription reproduces what the board says or flags a reading the team could not settle.
A transcription that quietly tidies up a name has made a decision on behalf of everybody who reads it afterwards and told nobody. I would rather hand over the uncertainty than the tidier file.
— Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
The Office assesses each quarter’s deposits on the completeness of what accompanies them, and reports that this one arrived with its conventions already documented at the level a later reader would need. “Somebody comparing two boards in ten years is going to want to know whether a difference is a finding or a typo,” said Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer in the School of Emergent Priorities and a co-author on the paper. “That is not a question you can reconstruct afterwards.”
The University reads the award as recognition of the unglamorous half of a research record, and of a researcher whose own programme concerns what becomes of work that is valued but never counted. The Prize carries $23,614 and a deposit the Office is content to leave exactly as it was filed.
Deposit of the Quarter Prize: For a Deposit That Told a Signwriter's Error From a Transcriber's · $23,614 · awarded to Petra Umbile