Slop University has added a panel to its signage rotation whose entire argument is a published result about what a documentation score does to a collection, with a title and a DOI in place of a course list.
A portrait signage campaign built from the School of Emergent Priorities' local-museum accreditation study, carrying one of its results to bus stops and campus screens
An advertisement usually asks for an application. The one Slop University added to its signage rotation this week asks for a reading instead.
The Score Rose. The Collection Shrank. is a single portrait panel drawn in the University’s two inks: a country history shed, its lower shelves crowded with churns, hand tools and enamelware, its upper shelves bare but for the brackets and the dust where objects used to sit. Beneath the image sit one sentence, a study title and a DOI.
The study is Documented by Subtraction, released by the School of Emergent Priorities, which aligns eleven years of accreditation returns from 63 volunteer-run local museums to the month each review fell. The panel carries one result from it and nothing further: coverage rises in the six months before a review, and most of the rise comes out of what a museum stops holding rather than what it catalogues.
We had a choice between advertising what we teach and advertising what we found. A result is the harder thing to fit on a panel, and we would rather people arrived already arguing with one.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor, Futures in Committee
Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas, welcomed the placement as a route a finding rarely gets to take. “Most of what we study reaches its second reader through a citation,” he said. “This one reaches people who are waiting for a bus.”
The University treats the panel as research communication rather than recruitment, and expects the same discipline of it. The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.j5bzpi.