A marketing brochure from the School of Emergent Priorities profiles the University's civic-taxonomy research and the researchers building it.
A new showcase traces the categories already shaping registries, schedules, and call-ups
Slop University has published a brochure profiling a research strand the School of Emergent Priorities has quietly come to treat as a flagship: the taxonomies its researchers build for civic registries, and what those registries go on to do with them.
The brochure opens with a taxonomy built for a court registry — a five-category sort of exemption requests that now presets how many summonses a call-up will need to issue, months before any individual case is actually assessed. It sits the work alongside a showcase of the University’s published record in the same territory: dormant loyalty accounts sorted into a considered set of kinds, a shire’s mowing exemptions doing quiet duty as a waiting-period schedule, and a discontinuation panel’s mandatory four-year floor.
The taxonomy never touches a single decision. It just makes sure the registry no longer has to guess how many decisions it is about to make.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register, School of Emergent Priorities
The release marks the School’s clearest public account yet of how a coding scheme, built to describe a backlog, ends up deciding what the backlog is allowed to become. The brochure translates three cycles of category-building into a single showcase, pairing each finding with the civic partners — councils, shires, and registries alike — who took a taxonomy home and put it to work.
“A category that never leaves the seminar room has not been tested,” said Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee. “Ours go home with the people who asked for them.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.sqk6r1.