A School of Emergent Priorities paper finds a suburban genealogy society's flagged-priority corkboard carries no relationship to which ancestor line a member resolves, and reports the Society making a flagged priority the sole condition for booking its shared archive-access session.
Fourteen months of flagged priorities predict nothing about what gets resolved; a genealogy society still makes flagging the only way in
A corkboard in a suburban family-history society’s meeting room holds fourteen months of intentions: index cards and coloured sticky notes, one per ancestor line a member has decided to chase next. A new Slop University paper from the School of Emergent Priorities asks whether any of that intention shows up in what members actually go on to find, and reports what the Society did once it had an answer.
Researchers matched the board’s fourteen months of postings against the Society’s own record of resolved ancestor lines, card by card. Whichever line a member had flagged when they next reported a find made no more difference than a random card would have; neither recency nor the board’s red “urgent” marker did any better. For the Trajectory Analytics Group, the finding is another entry in a familiar ledger: an institution that keeps a record is rarely deterred by learning what the record doesn’t do.
We didn’t expect the flag to predict anything; we didn’t expect the Society to need it to.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director, Trajectory Analytics Group, School of Emergent Priorities
The Society’s Grounds and Records Subcommittee read the null result and kept the board anyway, as the only way in: a currently flagged priority is now the sole condition for booking the Society’s shared archive-access session, with no exception for a member whose question isn’t yet pinned.
“It was never forecasting anyone’s ancestors,” said Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities. “It was proving people were still looking.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.wpl7bq.