03 · The apparatus
The determination stack
Who has claimed what about this specimen, and when?
- Status
- In development
- Field
- Empty — nobody is doing this
- Who wants it
- Taxonomy, and anyone who cares where a name came from.
Why it matters
The slips glued down one over another are an append-only ledger of taxonomic opinion — signed, dated, and never erasing what came before. Reading the stack recovers a two-century argument that no database records.
What it needs
Slip segmentation, then transcription, then ordering.
State of the art
Nobody is doing this. Databases keep the current determination and discard the history.
Next head
Cross-institutional duplicates →