Provenance#
Every specimen you submit carries a source, a date, and a verification level:
primary, secondary or apocryphal. A specimen with no provenance is not
marked down. It is not marked.
apocryphal is not a penalty. Several of this field’s best-known examples are
apocryphal, and establishing that is the work rather than a failure of it. What
is penalised is presenting one as though it were sourced.
Machine translation in your own submissions#
You may use machine translation in your coursework, and most of you will. Declare the system, the direction, and the date, in the same form you use for a specimen. A system’s output changes between versions, so an undeclared date makes your evidence unreproducible by anyone including you. This is a provenance rule, not a suspicion.
Photographing signage#
Most of what this course collects is in public. That does not make all of it yours to publish.
- Photograph the sign, not the people under it. If someone is identifiable and incidental, crop them out before the specimen enters the corpus.
- Shop interiors, menus and staff areas are private property. Ask.
- Record the place at the granularity you are willing to publish. “A noodle restaurant, Dickson, March 2027” is a provenance. A street address is a person’s workplace.
Late work#
Benches cannot be submitted late, because a bench is a room with people in it. Written work can: ask before the due date and a short extension is routine. Ask afterwards and it is an extenuating circumstances matter, which takes longer and is worse for everybody.
Academic integrity#
The corpus is shared. Using another student’s specimen is expected and encouraged, on the same terms as any other source: cite it, and do not inherit its verification level without checking it yourself.
If something is wrong here#
This page is a claim like any other on this site. If it contradicts the university’s own rules, the university’s rules win, and please tell the convenor which line to fix.