Service Marks in Domestic Meter Boxes
Anneke Tolan, Marek Solheim, Verity Marris · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.2cgh9b
A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities describes the marks left inside domestic meter-box doors by successive trade visits, photographing the meter enclosure at 1,247 owner-occupied addresses across nine suburbs and coding the 9,318 marks recovered. Three iterative passes of facet analysis yield a six-facet scheme --- medium, placement, persistence, referent, agent, date --- with 43 terminal codes, every mark independently coded by two of three coders under a balanced assignment (mean pairwise kappa 0.807). The median enclosure holds six marks spanning a median 14.3 years between its earliest and latest legible date; a substantive agent code can be assigned to 38.6 per cent of marks and a date code to 22.7 per cent, but both together to only 8.1 per cent, and 41.2 per cent of enclosures yield no mark carrying both. Pruning the 14 codes applied fewer than ten times leaves agreement unchanged. The Indicator Commons has since ratified the 43 codes as the Domestic Service Marking Schema, with conformance computed over marks made after adoption and the historical accumulation the paper describes falling outside the measured population.
