# Slop University reads a lens as a composer's sketchbook

> A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions applies the methods of musical sketch study to the hand calculations behind one microscope objective.

Is the lens that was built the last one its designer worked out? _The Wolf at
the Edge of the Field: A sketch study of one workshop's computing books for a
six-element microscope objective_, a research poster by Dr Brynjar Obiora,
Senior Research Fellow, and Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma, Associate
Professor and Lead, Basement Relations Group, both of the School of Underlying
Conditions, answers that it was not.

> I am told the microscope has sat on that bench longer than the School has had
> a name. It has been patient with us, and we have tried to read slowly in
> return.
>
> --- Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, School of Underlying Conditions

The poster brings the source-critical habits of music scholarship to bear on
eleven bound books of hand calculation from an unnamed instrument workshop, kept
beside the School's thin-section microscopes. It puts 386 leaves into the order
they were written, recovers nine successive versions of the design, and follows
where each one left its remaining error: first gathered at the rim of the view,
in the way an old keyboard tuning gathers its sourness into a single interval,
and later shared out across the whole. The objective that survives matches the
eighth version rather than the ninth.

The University counts the poster among the quieter evidences of its range.
Associate Professor Uzoma said the thin-section laboratory "had not expected to
be an archive, and has taken to it".

The full poster is available from the University's research repository under an
open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.w1pw51.