Lectures

Ten lectures across twelve weeks. Week 6 is field week and week 12 is the exhibit, and neither of them needs a lecture more than it needs the room.

Each lecture introduces one class of machine and the shape of error it leaves behind. They are in order on purpose: the errors get harder to see as the semester goes on, and by week 11 they are almost gone.

Week 01 · 22 FEB
What makes it wrong
An error needs a claim behind it — establishing the contract before we argue about the evidence
Deck
Week 02 · 1 MAR
The dictionary as suspect
Reading a lookup table backwards from three of its outputs, and the character merger that makes it possible
Deck
Week 03 · 8 MAR
Rules, and a story we cannot source
The 1954 demonstration, the 1966 report that ended it, and the anecdote this field repeats about itself without a citation
Deck
Week 04 · 15 MAR
Statistics, and the fluent join
Where the training text came from, why the errors moved from the word to the sentence, and how to date an artefact by the shape of its failure
Deck
Week 05 · 22 MAR
The network, and the confident wrong answer
The turning point of the semester — fluency and accuracy come apart, and an error stops announcing itself
Deck
Week 06 · 31 MAR
No lecture — the collection protocol, and then the room empties and everyone goes out and uses it
→ Field week
Week 07 · 12 APR
Signage and the state
Governance producing translation at scale, and one council sign where no translator was involved at any point
Deck
Week 08 · 19 APR
The volunteer, and the seam left in
Fansubbing, translator's notes and deliberate roughness — the only errors in this course that were chosen
Deck
Week 09 · 26 APR
Where it costs
Two cases where a translation error had a victim, and what that does to the standard of evidence this course has been using
Deck
Week 10 · 3 MAY
The round trip as an instrument
Producing error deliberately to measure a system you cannot open
Deck
Week 11 · 10 MAY
The seam closes
What happens to a method built on visible error when the errors stop being visible
Deck
Week 12 · 19 MAY
No lecture — the room becomes the display, and every card on the wall carries the provenance the semester has been arguing about
→ The exhibit