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Record W1562512885 · doi:10.1080/17512780802281172

OBITUARIES FOR SALE

2008· article· en· W1562512885 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournalism Practice · 2008
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicRace, History, and American Society
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNewspaperObituaryRevenuePremiseStyle (visual arts)RigourExpansiveAdvertisingHistoryMedia studiesPolitical scienceLawSociologyBusinessArtLiteraturePhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The paid obituary phenomenon has generated a fresh source of revenue for newspapers throughout the United States and Canada. Its remarkable growth has occurred in tandem with the renaissance of editorial obituary columns over the past 20 years. Some spectacular sums of money are expended on this facet of classified advertising; largesse, however, does not necessarily endow the practice with quality. It is not subjected to the rigour of house editorial style, it does not have to conform to the same code which is applied to display advertising, it can engage in whimsy and excessive sentiment, and its content often stretches both credulity and truth. Historians drawing on this soft underbelly of the newspaper obituary art will find their source material compromised by elision and fabrication. Yet, with classified revenue so important to newspapers everywhere, proprietors outside the United States and Canada could well be seduced by the financial return that this practice offers. It has the capacity to address a belief, expressed by the American journal U.S. News & World Report, that extending the classified agenda might be the only means by which some newspapers will avoid following their readers to the grave. Editorial integrity and advertising opportunity, accordingly, are subject to the potential for a new strain of confrontation.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.716
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0030.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.044
GPT teacher head0.357
Teacher spread0.313 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it