Week 9 Bench: What stays out of the exhibit

This bench does not open with an artefact. It opens with a list of everything in the corpus, and the question of what we are prepared to put on a wall.

The question#

An error that ended in a courtroom is not the same kind of object as an error on a menu. Both are evidence about a mechanism. Only one of them has a person still living with the outcome.

The course’s position is not that consequential specimens are off limits. It is that they are not collected casually, not displayed for their absurdity, and not introduced with the same register as the duck.

How it runs#

Each person nominates one specimen to exclude and gives a reason. Reasons that amount to it is offensive are sent back for a second attempt, because the exhibit is going to contain offensive language and everybody already knows it. The reasons that survive are about consent, identifiability, and whether the display adds anything the record does not.

Afterwards#

The exclusions are written down with their reasons and go into the exhibit’s own documentation. A curated corpus that does not say what it left out is not curated, it is edited.