Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay unpacks a new term in improvisation studies and discourse, improvisioning. Improvisioning––for want of a better word or, perhaps, as the best word to describe this practice beyond words—unifies notions of diverse improvisatory practices with what those practices express, the vision—aesthetic, social, intimate, unspeakable––that only an embodied, live, improvised performance can bring into being. Improvisioning implies not only the active elements in creative practices based on improvisation, but also the seeing into things (the envisioning) that improvisation makes possible, the calling forth of the unexpected, the making present of a response that could not have been predicted except in that moment, there in that specific context. 
 
 The epigraph to Fischlin's essay––from orator, social reformer, abolitionist, and author Frederick Douglass’s (1818-1895) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845); as part of an extended passage on 19th century musicking made by American slave populations––reminds us of two things. One, that music made in the key of slavery and oppression literally sees into the nature of things (in this case the “horrible nature of slavery”) in ways that other discourses do not—cannot. Two, that musical meaning is made out of specific contexts that challenge listeners’ capacity to take what is apparently “unmeaning jargon” and grasp its intent. “Jargon” here designates the very sign of difference upon which the social practice of slavery was predicated––those who can’t understand the “unmeaning jargon” are diminished by their incapacity. But this jargon also marks the utterly unique response, the singularity of the musical vision that captures and “impress[es]” minds with the unspeakable nature of oppression. Song, in this sense, improvisions: it sees, literally and figuratively, into things in an utterly distinctive fashion and reveals embedded truths about realities in powerfully affective ways.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 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".