Bibliographic record
Abstract
There has been much talk of an 'ontological turn' in Science and Technology Studies. This commentary explores some recent work on multiple and historical ontologies, especially articles published in this journal, against a background of constructivism. It can be tempting to read an ontological turn as based and promoting a version of perspectivism, but that is inadequate to the scholarly work and opens multiple ontologies to serious criticisms. Instead, we should read our ontological turn or turns as being about multiplicities of practices and the ways in which these practices shape the material world. Ontologies arise out of practices through which people engage with things; the practices are fundamental and the ontologies derivative. The purchase in this move comes from the elucidating power of the verbs that scholars use to analyze relations of practices and objects--which turn out to be specific cases of constructivist verbs. The difference between this ontological turn and constructivist work in Science and Technology Studies appears to be a matter of emphases found useful for different purposes.
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 | 0.015 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.083 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.043 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".