Bibliographic record
Abstract
Writing in his periodical The Friend in 1809, Samuel Taylor Coleridge described his contemporary moment as ‘this age of personality ’. 1 Although this comment, which Coleridge later quoted in Biographia Literaria , has sometimes been taken as a generalized description of Romanticism itself, Coleridge was in fact responding to a specific debate about the place of ‘personalities’ in public discourse, and especially in periodical writing. In this essay, I will sketch the contours of that debate and show how Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine sought to transform it. Coleridge uses the term ‘personality’ in OED’s sense 6b: ‘a statement or remark referring to or aimed at a particular person, and usually disparaging or offensive in nature’. This sense of the word dates from the late eighteenth century ( OED ’s first citation is from 1769 in connection with the Junius letters) and is more often found in the plural. John Scott, reviewing Benjamin Robert Haydon’s Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem , complained that Haydon had lowered his grand subject by including portraits of his contemporaries, especially Voltaire: ‘In this age of personalities, this is positively the worst personality we have yet witnessed’. 2 Coleridge and Scott used the word in the same sense, not simply to describe a Romantic culture that understood literature as the product of an individual personality, but rather to condemn a culture overrun by public references to private individuals, in which, as Coleridge continued, ‘the meanest insects are worshipped with a sort of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail!’ 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.004 |
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".