A new Slop University research poster sorts the titles of calendar invitations at a freight firm's head office into five kinds, and describes the booking rule that now sets room and length by kind for the University's seminar rooms.
A School of Emergent Priorities poster sorts 3,100 calendar invitations into five kinds by their titles, and the University will book its seminar rooms from the same list.
The word “quick” in an invitation’s title is, on the evidence of a research poster published today, the surest sign that a room will be held for a long time. The School of Emergent Priorities has read the titles of 3,100 calendar invitations at a freight firm’s head office, and the University will now book its own seminar rooms by what it found.
A title is the first thing a meeting ever says about itself, and it has been a privilege to sit and listen to it.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The poster, Quick Gets the Big Room, sets each invitation’s title beside the time its room was held past the booked slot. Its authors sorted the titles into five kinds, named Understatement, Bare noun, Courtesy, Declaration and Verdict, and found that the kinds keep a steady order from the longest-held to the shortest.
From the next teaching period, the University’s booking office will set the room and the length of a seminar booking from the kind its title belongs to, with no override, and will return any invitation whose title falls outside the five. The firm’s booking desk has worked to the same rule since the study closed.
Hedvig Anyanwu, Doctoral Candidate in the School, one of the poster’s co-authors, said the five kinds “give the booking desk a way of saying yes before anyone has had to ask.” The University is glad to have found, in a corridor’s worth of calendars, something it can book against.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qxxls5.