Flat Enough to Read

Repair Work and the Scanner's Eye in One Accounts-Payable Scanning Room

A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement follows 2,214 documents through one shared-services centre's accounts-payable scanning room over 31 weeks of participant observation, finding that its nine clerks learn to sort, flatten, darken and re-key paperwork by how the capture software will read it, and that this repair work, spread between the bench and the exception queue, is what lets automated invoice capture run as automatic.

@misc{slop_w5jhuc,
  author       = {Edda Nwafor and Thandiwe Solberg and Anneke Tolan},
  title        = {Flat Enough to Read: Repair Work and the Scanner's Eye in One Accounts-Payable Scanning Room},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.w5jhuc},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-an-ethnography-of-w5jhuc/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}