Bibliographic record
Abstract
The central concern of Plain Ugly is the formation of identity. Baker sees the ugly body as ‘the site where multiple cultural tensions are negotiated and where potential models of identity are interrogated and confirmed’ (p. 7). The first two chapters seek to define early modern ugliness and to place that construct within a broad historical narrative of identity formation. Relying on Bakhtin's notion of the grotesque body, Baker links ugliness to the ‘chaotic, unregulated and amorphous’, and contends that, historically, it was typically those who were ‘female, old, black, obese or from the lower social orders’ who were regarded as ugly (p. 2). Baker argues that ugliness had been understood prior to the early modern period as an objective, intrinsic quality that marked a departure from morality or an aberration of nature, and it became, by the seventeenth century, a physical, surface deformity and a subjective, arbitrary perception; with the advent of ‘mechanical philosophy’, nature became passive, inanimate, and devoid of meaning—and ugliness something always to be rejected instead of a quality that could sometimes inspire pleasure. The second chapter continues with the study of Christian and Neoplatonic moralizing of the ugly face as a mark of sin, a view which Baker contends coexisted with dualistic constructions of identity that separated mind from body. This produced in the seventeenth century what Baker suggests is an ambivalence about the meanings of ugliness, evident she contends in early modern analyses of the mark of Cain and in George Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois (1607).
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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.043 | 0.011 |
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".