A paper from the Schools of Underlying Conditions and Emergent Priorities follows a soil survey as it attributes its unsigned profile cards to their describers, and finds the names put to work as corrections to the data.
An archive of profile descriptions is given its authors, and each author then becomes a correction to the soil
Every soil profile in a survey’s archive was written down by somebody, and when a regional survey’s new database insisted on knowing who, more than a third of its cards could not say. A Hand in the Ground, a new paper by Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow in the School of Underlying Conditions, and Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer in the School of Emergent Priorities, follows the eighteen months in which the survey’s staff gave those cards their authors.
The survey’s former describers gave up a good many afternoons to tell us who they had each been, and to tell one another. I am grateful to all of them, and particularly to the ones who recognised my cards before I did.
— Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, School of Underlying Conditions
Read through the lens of science and technology studies, attribution emerges as a practice that moves across a working archive: from colleagues reading one another’s habits of notation around a table, through a model trained for the typed cards, to a table of offsets that now travels with every legacy record the survey serves. Of 1,209 unsigned cards, all but 137 were placed with a named describer; the remainder are corrected as the work of a pooled one.
Dr Chikere said the School of Emergent Priorities would “be looking at its own forms with fresh eyes, especially the boxes marked optional”.
The University counts the paper among the most attentive accounts yet of how its field sciences keep their records, and of the people folded into them.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.kupw80.