A new Slop University research poster codes 214 watering-roster excuses from eleven community gardens into a six-category typology, finding one category precedes formal plot reassignment more than any other.
A typology coded from eleven gardens' committee minutes finds one excuse precedes formal plot reassignment more than any other.
A committee minute doesn’t preserve what a plot-holder said. It preserves what the convenor had time to write down, and “between plantings” is what gets written when nobody has time to write anything else.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation, School of Continuous Improvement
Two hundred and fourteen logged excuses, eleven community gardens, and six categories later, Slop University’s newest research poster has done for the watering roster what the School of Continuous Improvement’s Evaluation of Evaluation program has long done for everything else: given an informal practice a coding scheme it never asked for.
Dr Okafor and Dr Bram Ntuli read three years of committee minutes across the eleven gardens, coding every logged reason a watering slot went unfilled into one of six categories, agreeing closely enough between them to call the scheme settled. “Between plantings” led the list by a wide margin, and turned up more than any other category in the minutes written just before a plot changed hands.
“It’s less a finding about gardens than about paperwork,” said Dr Ntuli, whose own work follows what a standing review format leaves off the record. “The category isn’t lying, exactly. It’s just doing a lot of quiet work that a stricter form would have refused it.”
The University reads the typology as a small addition to a much longer project: teaching its own informal registers to hold still long enough to be compared.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.mdgp33.