The brief#
Take one artefact from the corpus and argue backwards from it to the process that produced it. Be specific enough to be wrong.
Not a survey. Not three artefacts compared. One.
What a strong reconstruction does#
It commits. A lookup table with these senses in this order is a claim somebody could disprove. Machine translation is imperfect is not a claim at all, and it is what most first drafts say in their final paragraph.
It also says what would falsify it. If a photograph surfaced showing the sign was hand-painted by the owner, what in your argument survives? Answering that in the piece is worth more than another paragraph of support.
Marking#
Provenance is the record: does the artefact hold up, and is its verification level the right one rather than the flattering one?
Argument is the reconstruction: is it specific, does it follow from the evidence, and is the line between evidence and inference visible on every page?
Scope is judgement: one artefact taken all the way, rather than four taken a short distance. A piece that widens in its last three paragraphs to say something general about language and technology loses marks here, and almost every draft tries it.
What you submit#
A written piece of 1500–2000 words, and the corpus entry it is built on if that entry is yours.
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- one artefact, named, sourced and dated, with the verification level defended
- the reconstruction distinguishes every observation from every inference
- the piece states what would falsify it
- 1500 to 2000 words
How it is marked
| Criterion | Weight |
|---|---|
| Provenance | 30% |
| Argument | 45% |
| Scope | 25% |