Rules, and a story we cannot source

SLOP8217 · Week 3

On 7 January 1954 a joint Georgetown and IBM demonstration translated a few dozen Russian sentences into English

The 1954 demonstration, the 1966 report that ended it, and the anecdote this field repeats about itself without a citation

The vodka is good but the meat is rotten

apocryphal

no va

The Chevrolet Nova apocryphal

That is the documented part.

Outline

  • what a six-rule system can and cannot get wrong
  • ALPAC, and what “quality” meant to the people who measured it

Outline

  • the vodka story, and the shape of an unsourceable claim
  • a field that studies unreliable text, told through its own

At the bench on Wednesday

Trace it back

Wednesday, 10 March

Material
a citation chain
Operation
tracing it to the source
Leaves
a written record of where the chain stopped