A sitting
What a sitting is, and why it is the unit
A stretch at one place, ended by something. Why the record counts stretches rather than hours, and what that choice leaves out.
What a sitting is
A stretch of work at one place, ended by something or by nothing. The unit the whole record rests on, fixed before the logs began, and what it cannot see.
Why stretches and not hours
An hours column and a stretches column can describe the same day and disagree about everything that matters. Why this record counts the thing that can end.
The two hundred and twenty-five
Every sitting in the record, where it came from, and how the total divides between nine homes that kept the same log for a week each.
What the log asked for
Five fields, one of them a dash, and a list of nine endings written out in advance. The instrument, set down so that somebody else could use it.
What the log did not ask
The questions deliberately left out, the reasons for leaving them out, and what the record therefore cannot be used to argue.
The median day
Five sittings, two places, and eleven days out of forty-five spent entirely in one spot. What an ordinary logged day looked like.
The longest and the shortest
A hundred and ninety-four minutes at one end, six at the other, and a distribution that is not shaped the way a discussion of interruption would predict.
What counts as the same place
Thirty-one places in nine dwellings, counted by the households rather than by a rule. What that choice bought and what it cost.
When the unit is wrong
Four ways the sitting could be the wrong thing to count, what each would do to the findings, and which of them the record can rule out.