A new Slop University paper reconstructs one season of deputising across a 19-band regional brass band association, finding six players whose withdrawal would leave a third of the calendar unstaffable and a membership index that rises as a band's reliance on borrowed players increases.
A network analysis of one season's attendance returns finds nearly a quarter of chairs filled by borrowed players, and the association's health index rising as reliance grows.
The band that plays beside a war memorial on a public holiday morning looks like a fixture of the town it belongs to. A paper published today by the School of Emergent Priorities reconstructs one season of a regional band association’s paperwork and finds nineteen such fixtures held together, in part, by six people.
Dr Petra Umbile, Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Dr Lindiwe Achterberg and Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist rebuilt the season’s deputising from returns the association already holds — 187 engagements, 604 registered players, 4,932 scored chairs — as a network linking every player to the bands they turned out for. Just under a quarter of the chairs actually staffed went to someone registered with another band. Six players, each registered with one band and appearing for four or more, sit at the joins: withdraw them and the share of the season’s engagements that could be staffed to instrumentation falls from 94 per cent to 62.
Every secretary in this association fills in their own form correctly. What we are describing is not visible from any single return, which is why it took the whole season’s paperwork to see it.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee, School of Emergent Priorities
The University is glad to see a method developed for its own registers turned outward onto a volunteer sector that has been keeping this kind of record for more than a century, and regards the result as a useful addition to the School’s work on indicators that report good health up to the moment they stop being able to.
“The association can now compute the same index two ways, which is more than it could do last week,” said Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies. “Whether it wants to is properly a question for its members.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.vl3hsx.