The vital materiality of aluminum: light modernity and the global Atlantic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the significance of new ontological approaches to vibrant materialities and to mobilities research for re-thinking the globality of the Atlantic world. It does so through a study of bauxite mining and aluminum smelting as an agent of globalization and a mobile materialization of uneven global modernities. Aluminum can be thought of not just as an inert metal that is acted upon, but as a complex agent enrolled into transnational circuits, structuring and structured by the connections between them. The first section begins by sketching the idea of the global Atlantic; the second section focuses on methods of “following things” as a productive way of doing global history; and the third gives a brief account of the mobilities and materialities of aluminum based in part on the author's book Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity. In following the material assemblages and energetic transformations of bauxite/aluminum, this account seeks to bring to light the long-distance trans-oceanic relations that connect Atlantic political economies into global political ecologies.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
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.
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".