Beyond obscenity: an analysis of sexual discourse in LIS educational texts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose – This research seeks to discover the type of discourse encouraged around controversial materials, particularly those of a sexual nature, in LIS educational texts. Censorship and controversial materials are often issues addressed in the LIS literature, but even with ideals of neutrality it can be difficult to remain balanced on certain issues, particularly those dealing with sex. Design/methodology/approach – A content analysis of 85 LIS texts on collection development, reference, and intellectual freedom was completed using the following thematic elements: sex, pornography, erotica, curiosa, facetiae, obscenity, censorship, and controversial materials. Deeper analysis of individual definitions and usages was informed by Michel Foucault's perspective that education “follows the well-trodden battle lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse” (Foucault, 1972, p. 227). Findings – Findings from the investigation indicate that LIS texts are predominately pejorative when discussing sexual topics such as erotica and pornography. Few texts provide distinctions between different types or genres of sexual materials. Research limitations/implications – The majority of texts analyzed for this study were published in the USA and hence have an American bias. This bias necessitated the use of American legal terminology and a reliance on American Library Association guidelines for examination purposes. The emphasis on American terminology may limit the applicability of the results outside of North America. Originality/value – Sex is one of the most highly cited reasons for challenges to materials in libraries. At the same time the mainstream popularity of theFifty Shades of Greytrilogy has created a new, widespread interest in the publishing, reading, and collecting of erotica. An understanding of how these texts are defined and identified in the LIS literature provides greater understanding of the discipline's biases.
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 | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| 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".