Towards a Transcription-Loss Taxonomy

Four copy generations of 612 community craft patterns, and 288 garments knitted to measure what each one lost

A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities assembles 612 pattern transmission chains from 41 community craft groups, each traced through four documented copy generations, and codes their 47,300 instruction units against a 22-class scheme (two coders, Krippendorff's alpha 0.88). To test whether drift on the page reaches the finished object, 288 garments were knitted from generations one to four at held yarn, needle and tension and measured on a calibrated frame blind to generation. Divergence from the first-generation pattern rises to the third copy and then flattens, with finished chest circumference narrowing from a 27.6 cm spread at generation 1 to 5.9 cm at generation 4 around a value no first-generation pattern specifies; instructions directing the knitter to work until the piece sits right are lost earliest and return in 0.3 per cent of later copies. The poster offers compiling committees a five-class Transcription-Loss Taxonomy to be ticked beside each altered instruction.

@misc{slop_7yzno3,
  author       = {Runa Adegoke and Anouk Mensah and Marek Solheim},
  title        = {Towards a Transcription-Loss Taxonomy: Four copy generations of 612 community craft patterns, and 288 garments knitted to measure what each one lost},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.7yzno3},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-a-knitting-pattern-7yzno3/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}