When authors<i>made</i>books: a first look at the content and form of self-published works in Paris (1750–1791)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article focuses on material and editorial issues as part of the self-publishing process experienced by authors in Paris at the end of the Old Regime. Because they did not sell their manuscript to booksellers-publishers, who then normally had exclusive authority over its publication, authors who published on their own had the opportunity to deal directly with printers, and thus be involved in the book-making process. Did the fact that these writers had, presumably, more control over the publishing process have any influence on what they published and on the material quality of their books? In order to provide some answers to these questions, the article will examine the particularities of what was self-published in the French capital between 1750 and 1791 with regard to content – by looking at the types of works thus produced – and with regard to form – by examining different material criteria such as editorial and financial choices.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".