Bibliographic record
Abstract
Starting with the observation that, as with many sf texts, colonialism is a major theme in Battlestar Galactica (2003-9), this article considers the extent to which the representation of the robot antagonists, the Cylons, reflects imperialist discourse. In particular, it focuses on the Cylon model Number Eight, played by Korean-Canadian actress Grace Park, in the light of David Morley and Kevin Robins's work on ‘techno-orientalism’. As the name implies, techno-orientalism adapts Edward Said's influential concept of Orientalism to the late twentieth century and shifts its focus from the Eastern Mediterranean to East Asia, examining the negative stereotypes of this region produced by the West in response to the perceived threat of its economic success. However, the emergence of this discourse does not mean that older racist perceptions of Asian people and cultures have disappeared; figures such as the ‘Asian seductress’ and the ‘Madame Butterfly’ continue to appear alongside and combined with techno-orientalist imagery. This article inspects BSG for orientalist tropes and narratives both old and new, to examine the way in which they intersect and to consider whether the series ultimately upholds or subverts them.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 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".