Week 2 Practical: Historical taxonomies of anomalous phenomena

How the course's classification scheme took its present shape, and why three earlier taxonomies were retired rather than patched.

1 March 2027

Before the practical#

No preparation beyond the logging habit from week 1.

In the practical#

A walk through three retired schemes and why each broke:

• an early single-axis hostile / benign scale, which failed the first time a case read as both within the same week
• a purely spatial scheme (indoor / outdoor / liminal), which couldn’t place a phenomenon that changed category between observations
• the current scheme, which classifies by behaviour under observation — persistent, recurring, responsive, or dormant — rather than by appearance or location, and lets a case belong to more than one category at once

Notice what’s missing from all three retired schemes above: no named historical incident, no founding “case zero” invented to justify them. This course describes a retired scheme by the structural gap it failed to accommodate, not by a specific anecdote built to sell it — the same sourcing discipline this course holds its own case files to from week 4 onward. A scheme earns its place by what it can classify, not by a good story about where it came from.

Why non-exclusive membership matters, in practice rather than in the abstract: a full case held back until week 7 involves an object with a consistently affectionate, entirely benign baseline behaviour that, rarely and only while unobserved, does something else altogether. Under the old hostile/benign scale it would have to be filed as one or the other and misfiled either way. The current scheme classifies it as persistent (the affectionate baseline) and dormant (the rare behaviour) at the same time — two tracked channels on one case file, not a forced choice.

Afterwards#

No submission this week. The vocabulary introduced here is what next week’s warding unit assumes you already have, and what your week 5–6 case files are marked against.