Cohering Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century: Form, Genre and Periodical Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues that as we reimagine nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers as digital objects we should pay particular attention to how we model their forms. As something that is repeated with each issue, form is both a key component of a particular publication’s identity and the mechanism through which it accommodates the events that it reports. Through a reading of John Tyndall’s “Discourse on the Scientific Use of the Imagination,” I argue that form is the means through which scientists imagined what they did not know, substituting system and structure for the unordered abundance of the natural world. Journalism, oriented towards an equally complex and changing world, similarly attempts to represent it as ordered and knowable. The orientation of titles towards particularly newsworthy institutions acts as a filter, identifying certain types of information at the expense of countless others, and the organization of publications into sections allocates space for events to be reported even before they occur. In this way the forms of the press operate in a similar fashion to the scientific imagination, displacing the new with the familiar, the unknown with the yet-to-be-known, and chaos with system.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.015 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".