Archives, Life Cycles, and Death Wishes: A Helical Model of Record Formation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ce texte élabore le modèle d'un concept de création de documents (« record formation »).En partant d'une analyse des qualités temporelles du cycle de vie dans la pratique archivistique, il montre ensuite comment le parler métaphorique et les concepts de vie auxquels les archivistes souscrivent sont venus appuyer la pensée et la pratique archivistique tout en les limitant.À partir de cette critique, le texte propose qu'une figure hélicoïdale, basée sur certaines idées médiévales au sujet de la mort, de la résurrection et de l'identité humaine, nous permet de constituer un modèle temporel capable de mieux disposer les dynamiques complexes relatives à la création de documents.La forme spiralée caractéristique de la figure hélicoïdale permet la représentation de la création de documents comme un acte qui se déroule simultanément de façon linéaire et non-linéaire.Le texte soutient alors que ce concept de la création de documents est plus en mesure d'énoncer les phénomènes documentaires de vie et de mort que les archivistes rencontrent et influencent dans leur travail que ne le font des notions comme « document », « gestion de documents » et « essence du document » (« recordness »).ABSTRACT This article develops a model of a concept of record formation.Beginning with an analysis of the temporal qualities of the life cycle in archival practice, it goes on to show how the metaphorical language and concepts of life to which archivists are beholden, have empowered archival thought and practice, but also imprisoned them.Proceeding from this critique, the article then proposes that a helical figure, developed from certain medieval ideas of death, resurrection, and human identity, enables us to develop a temporal model that better accommodates the complex dynamics of "record formations."The characteristic coiled shape of helical figures permits the depiction of record formation as simultaneously unfolding in a linear and non-linear fashion.The article argues that the concept of record formation better articulates the life-and-death documentary phenomena archivists encounter and influence in their work than do such notions as "record," "record-keeping" and "recordness."First, then, in my judgment, we must make a distinction and ask, what is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which is always becoming and never is? 1 Records are information presented in a static form.The act of recording "sets" 1 Plato, Timaeus. 236Archivaria 61 the information firmly in format on a medium or carrier.This characteristic renders records authentic and is especially important in electronic recordkeeping. 2 The life cycle model sees records passing through stages until they eventually "die," except for the "chosen ones" that are reincarnated as archives. 3
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 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".