The VroniPlag Wiki Scarf

Debora Weber-Wulff
Happenings

I was at the WCRI17 in Amsterdam, when Cath Ellis told me about some very cool knitting ideas such as Knit the Sky. She loved the barcodes that VroniPlag Wiki automatically generates out of the fragment documentations produced manually. Wouldn't it be cool, she said, to have a shawl or scarf knitted with these patterns?

Since the Mm trial was coming up soon in Leipzig, a plagiarism case that has wound its way though the German courts for the last five years, I decided to try my hand at knitting it as a scarf. The thesis weighs in at a good 400 pages, and so for every page that has a line on the bar code I would knit a row. There are 5 colors necessary: blue (pages not counted in the total), white (pages not yet investigated or nothing found yet), black (less than 50 % of the lines plagiarized), deep red (more than 50% but less than 75% plagiarized), and bright red (more than 75% of the lines). I used 100% cotton that comes in 50g skeins, and only needed 2 skeins of each color (although I bought more to be on the safe side).

I used the barcode pages list for putting together the knitting list (and found 2 pages in the process that were missing in the complete list). I cast on 80 stitches (needs to be a multiple of 4) and knitted 2 purl / 2 knit ribbing so that the front and back are the same. I used a round 3.0 set of needles so that I could start the colored rows on either end (saves an enormous amount of sewing loose ends at the end). Cast on with blue as row 0. The colors for the rows are given below:

Blue rows:
1-10, 363-415

White rows:
11-18, 20, 22-69, 71-74, 89-94, 99, 114-115, 134, 148-149, 152, 156, 161,
170, 173, 181-183, 185, 189-90, 198, 201, 205-213, 219, 226-227, 230,
232-239, 251-252, 265, 270-271, 275-277, 289-329, 331-332, 334-339,
341-344, 346-362

Black rows:
19, 21, 70, 84, 87-88, 95-96, 98, 100-101, 103-105, 110, 112-113,
116, 118, 121-122, 124-127, 132-133, 147, 150-151, 153-155,
158-160, 162-163, 167-169, 171-172, 174, 176-180, 184, 188, 191-192,
194, 196-197, 199-200, 202-204, 214-216, 218, 220-222, 224-225,
228, 231, 241-246, 249-250, 253, 255-256, 258, 261, 266-268,
274, 279-280, 283, 287-288, 330, 333, 340, 345

Dark red rows:
75, 81-82, 86, 97, 107-109, 111, 117, 119-120, 129, 135, 138, 150, 157,
175, 193, 223, 225, 229, 240, 247, 254, 259, 260, 263, 264, 269, 272,
284, 286

Bright red rows:
76-80, 83, 85, 102, 106, 123, 126-128, 130-131, 136-137, 139-146,
164-166, 186-187, 195-196, 217, 241, 248, 257, 262, 273, 278, 281-282, 285

Sew all the loose ends.

Et voilà:

The Mm-Shawl