This week
- Lecture
- 8 March 2027 Rules, and a story we cannot source
- Slides
- Open the deck
- Specimens
The vodka is good but the meat is rotten
The vodka is good but the meat is rotten apocryphalno va
The Chevrolet Nova apocryphal
Bench
- Material
- a citation chain
- Operation
- tracing it to the source
- Leaves
- a written record of where the chain stopped
Everyone in this room has heard that an early machine translation system turned the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak into the vodka is good but the meat is rotten. Today we find out who saw that happen.
The method
Start from wherever you first met the story. Find the source it cites. Find that source’s source. Write each step down with its date. Continue until one of three things happens: you reach a primary account, you reach a citation that does not resolve, or you reach a source that cites nothing.
Most of you will hit the third. Write down where.
Why this is a whole bench
Because the answer changes what the rest of the semester is allowed to say. If the story has no source, then every page of this site that repeats it has to say so, and the corpus needs a verification level that means widely repeated, unsourced rather than quietly dropping it.
Failing to find a source is a finding. It goes in the record with the same weight as a photograph.
Afterwards
Compare chains across the room. Where two of you stopped at different points, one of you found a step the other missed — that is the useful half hour.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you have a written citation chain for the story, in order, with dates
- you have marked the point where the chain stops resolving
- you can name what would count as a primary source, whether or not one exists
Teaching team
- Ines Barrantes — convenor