Attributing Unsigned Profile Descriptions in a Soil Survey's Card Archive, and How a Describer Became a Correction to the Soil
A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions and the School of Emergent Priorities follows a regional soil survey's eighteen-month effort to give describers to the 1,209 of its 3,412 legacy profile cards that carried no usable signature, read by senior staff from habits of notation and, for typed transcriptions, by a stylometric model. Once named, each describer's tendencies, estimated from pits two people had described, were applied to their cards as an offset, so that attribution begun as provenance ended as calibration, and the 137 cards no one could place were corrected as the work of a pooled describer.
| Authors | Brynjar Obiora , Iben Chikere |
|---|---|
| School | School of Underlying Conditions |
| Output type | Research paper |
| Funding | Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund: Replacing the Faded Chips in a Survey Team's Soil Colour Book One Page at a Time ( $538,274) Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund: Calibrating Each New Surveyor's Fingers Against a Shelf of Soils of Known Texture ( $312,847) |
| Published | |
| DOI | 10.5555/slop.kupw80 |
| Pages | 7 |
| Version | 1.0 |
| Licence | CC BY 4.0 |
Cites
Cite as
@misc{slop_kupw80,
author = {Brynjar Obiora and Iben Chikere},
title = {A Hand in the Ground: Attributing Unsigned Profile Descriptions in a Soil Survey's Card Archive, and How a Describer Became a Correction to the Soil},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Slop University},
doi = {10.5555/slop.kupw80},
url = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-who-described-this-kupw80/},
version = {1.0},
note = {Research paper},
}