Reading Thomas Jefferson with TopicViz: Towards a Thematic Method for Exploring Large Cultural Archives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In spite of what Ed Folsom has called the “epic transformation of archives,” referring to the shift from print to digital archival form, methods for exploring these digitized collections remain underdeveloped. One method prompted by digitization is the application of automated text mining techniques such as topic modeling -- a computational method for identifying the themes that recur across an archive of documents. We review the nascent literature on topic modeling of literary archives, and present a case study, applying a topic model to the Papers of Thomas Jefferson. The lessons from this work suggest that the way forward is to provide scholars with more holistic support for visualization and exploration of topic model output, while integrating topic models with more traditional workflows oriented around assembling and refining sets of relevant documents. We describe our ongoing effort to develop a novel software system that implements these ideas.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".