A new research-showcase brochure from the School of Emergent Priorities reports what the tear-off cards at shopping-centre entrances look like as distributions, and introduces the Last-Tab Rule that now governs when a University notice comes down.
A survey of tear-off cards on shopping-centre noticeboards sets a nine-tab fringe for every notice the University posts
Every notice the University posts now carries a fringe of nine tabs, and none comes down until the last of them has been taken. The Last-Tab Rule is the practical result of Towards the Last Tab, a new research-showcase brochure from the School of Emergent Priorities that draws together a survey of the small tear-off cards pinned beside the doors of shopping centres.
The survey reports its findings as distributions rather than averages: how many tabs a card still carries, and for how many weeks it has hung. The brochure sets those shapes alongside the University’s wider record of notices, signs and stubs, and the Indicator Commons now keeps the register in which each University notice and its fringe are entered.
A noticeboard is a public record kept by strangers, and we have tried to read it as carefully as it was pinned.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Futures in Committee
Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons, said the Rule gives the moment a notice is finished “the standing it has always deserved”. The University is proud to see so small a piece of paper carry so much of a community’s attention, and the School expects the fringe to travel into other corners of University life in due course.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.7wnnae.