Field Research: Variability of Textual Representations

We emphasize words in bold to highlight what we believe to be important individual elements in each reading:

• A woman sits, looking out the window of a rather spacious train car suite, baggage netting overhead. Beside her, a young man is sleeping underneath a fancy glass wall-lamp. At the door to the suite is a man wearing a wide-brimmed hat, presumably an ominous figure as only his silhouette is visible through the glass pane. He is turning the handle and the woman is oblivious. -A.B.

• Two men are sitting in a train compartment. One of them is sleeping and a person is seen through the door window looking into the compartment.-K.R.

• The inside of an old-fashioned train cabin. A man sits at one end of the cabin, asleep with his head against the corner wall, his cap tilted back on his head to reveal a combover. He wears a necktie, but looks rumpled. There is a sconce on the wall he leans against. On the other end of the cabin, so close to us that only part of her face is in the frame, is a woman--we see her nose, lips and chin, and part of her collar. Through the glass in the cabin doorway we see a shadowy figure, probably a man (from his shape and his fedora), possibly with spectacles. He is turning the handle of the door.-E.T.

• Two people are sitting side by side on a booth, with space the width of a person in between them. The person sitting on the right (on the left side of the frame) is in the foreground of the image, in close-up, so that his/her eyes are cut out of the frame and we can't see below his/her neck and shoulders. The person sitting to his or her left is a male and appears to be a worker because of his cap. It looks like he's either sleeping or winking--one eye's definitely closed. They're probably on a train; it looks like there's an overhead compartment above them with a netted bottom, and there's a lamp on the wall over the worker, which I'm guessing he's sleeping against.-J.S.

• Against a wall next to a door a man appears to be leaning. He is either asleep, injured to the point of unconsciousness, or dead. A figure is visible in silouhette in the window panes on the door. Apparently masculine, the figure wears a hat and what look to be glasses. The knob of the door is moving (as marked by the lines around it) as though the figure is about to enter the enclosure. In this frame, we can see that it is either night or dark.-A.S.