A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities sorts the items on food-truck menu boards into five kinds by availability, and the Horizon Register adopts the vocabulary as the standard for University function orders and trading-bay permits.
The Horizon Register adopts a five-kind vocabulary for food-truck menu boards as the University's ordering standard
What a menu board promises and what a truck can serve are two different lists, and the University has now given the difference a vocabulary. The Horizon Register has adopted five named kinds of menu-board item as the standard for how a University function is ordered and how a trading bay is renewed.
The paper, by Tove Ilesanmi, Dr Lindiwe Achterberg and Dr Runa Adegoke of the School of Emergent Priorities, follows 583 listed items across the boards of 46 trucks on one street-food circuit. Each item is assigned a kind (Standing, Sell-down, Rotating, Phantom or Vestigial) from hourly readings of whether it could be served at the window, and two coders reached a high level of agreement on the assignments. The kind of an item proved to be unrelated to where it sits on the board.
A board reads as one list. It turned out to be five, and I had not expected to be so fond of the smallest.
— Tove Ilesanmi, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
Under the standard, a function order names items from a truck’s Standing column and from no other, and a trading-bay permit is renewed where the Standing share of the board reaches the Register’s threshold. The order form carries no space for the remaining kinds.
Dr Adegoke said the School had “learned how much of a board is written for the first hour of the day, and we are glad to have the words for it.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.0nralw.