Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses the use of quotation evidence from canonical literary texts in the Oxford English Dictionary. The proportionately high representation of quotations from authors such as Shakespeare and Scott in OED quotations has been discussed since the 1980s, and has been emphasised in some of the most important adverse criticism of the dictionary. After commenting on the historical background to the dictionary's treatment of literary quotation evidence, the article examines two kinds of claim which have been made about it: first, that the record of the English language is avoidably distorted by OED's past and continuing preference for quotations from canonical (and preponderantly male) authors, and second, that some choices made in the selection of quotation evidence appear to reflect the personal prejudices of OED editors. In evaluating these claims, it discusses the practicalities of gathering and replacing quotation evidence and the relationship of readers to different kinds of evidence, and analyses a number of OED entries with regard to the quotation material which they use or might have used.
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 | 0.009 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.020 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
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".