Week 12 Seminar: Seminar

Student cases, and revision.

10 May 2027

Open the slides

The case, or the argument#

There is no new case this week. Instead, the seminar runs on cases the class brings: each student presents one situation, found outside this syllabus, read through the framework built in weeks 1–11 — a claimed capability, a record track, a capability track, and, if there is one, a rupture point. The point of the exercise is not to find an eleventh dramatic example as good as FOGBANK or the F-1. It’s to find out whether the framework still does useful work on a case nobody chose for how well it would illustrate the argument.

Revisit the guesses from week 1 — “documentation problem” or “capability problem,” made before any case had been read. If the framework earned its keep, those guesses should be easier to make now, and wrong in more interesting ways than they were in week 1.

What we do in the seminar#

Each student presents one outside case in five minutes: the claim, the record track, the capability track, and a one-line diagram sketched on the board using this course’s own vocabulary. The class asks one question each: where does this case press on a distinction the syllabus drew too cleanly?

One reading#

Polanyi (1958) — return to the source text one last time. Read the opening chapter again, not the laser case; most students find it says something different the second time.

A question left open#

Institutional memory is the thing this course is nominally about, taught by an institution, in a seminar, using slides that will themselves eventually be old records of a practice. If this course stopped running for a decade and then restarted from these files alone, what would the person restarting it be missing that these pages don’t say?