Differential Register Prioritization in Machine-Mediated Reading is a methodological specification by Lee Sharks, deposited 21 July 2026.
It describes a failure mode in how machines read ambiguous human artifacts — a handwritten page, a line of verse, a phrase that lives in more than one register. The mechanism it names: a system reads every later word through the field its earlier readings established. An early recognition that prioritizes one register propagates forward, and subsequent ambiguities resolve toward that register not because the evidence favours it but because the field has already been set.
The consequence is that machine reading of ambiguous material is path-dependent in a way human reading is not — a human can revise the frame retroactively, while a system that has committed early tends to compound. The specification proposes interpretive protocols that hold registers open longer, and it belongs beside the handwritten-artifact work (#1409, #1407), where register ambiguity is not an edge case but the ordinary condition of the material.