Cover story
The trail is the real product
Every object is a sentence someone wrote about it. A felled tree, a sawn board, a bale of wool, a fired tile: each step leaves a trace. A delivery note, a batch number, a dated invoice, a sample kept in a drawer. Put those traces in order and you have a provenance trail. Leave them out and you have a label, which is a claim with nothing behind it.
We are not against labels. We are against labels that ask to be believed without showing their work. The journal is written for people who want to check the work: makers choosing stock, specifiers writing briefs, teachers building a unit on materials, and anyone who has held an object and wondered where its story stops.
A trail usually runs through five stations. Each one should leave at least one record.
- Origin. The place where the raw material began: a woodland, a flock, a seam or a field.
- Harvest. The first physical act: felling, shearing, digging or picking.
- Processing. Sawing, carding, spinning, firing or smelting. Each step changes the material, and often the paperwork with it.
- Transport. Every move is a chance for a record to go missing. Ask for the document for each leg.
- Finishing. Dyes, glazes, sealants and coatings can hide what lies beneath. Ask what was applied, and with which product.
What proof means here
Proof is a record that could have been wrong. A sales sentence cannot be wrong, so it proves nothing. A delivery note with a date, a weight and a sender can be checked against the next document in the chain. When two records agree, the trail gets stronger. When they disagree, you have found the question worth asking.
Three questions for any supplier
Start with questions a supplier can answer in writing.
- Where was this made or grown, as close to the source as they can say?
- Which record would show it, and can you see that record yourself?
- Which part of the trail do they not have, and can they find it?
A good supplier answers plainly, even when the honest answer is that they do not know yet. That reply tells you more than a polished sentence.
Why a grid
The lab on this site runs Conway's Game of Life, a cellular automaton, on a field of small cells. Each cell lives or dies according to the cells around it. It is a toy, and we say so. It is useful for one idea: a patch persists when its neighbors support it, and fades when it is crowded or cut off.
Resources, like those cells, depend on what surrounds them. Try the lab, then come back to the trail.
How we write
- We name the source before we state the claim.
- We say what we cannot verify, in the same paragraph, not in a footnote.
- We quote a record in full when a reader needs to check its wording.
Read next
Start with the reading guide for the method. Read About for who the journal is written for. If you have a trail you want checked, write to us.