Bibliographic record
Abstract
In writing the present essay, I have poached my title from a highly regarded old book by George Dangerfield entitled The Strange Death of Liberal England – chosen mainly for the bleak but, as I shall argue, appropriate catchiness of the spin I’ve sought to give to the title here. But there’s a substantive resonance to the link as well. Dangerfield writes of the period of proto-revolutionary upsurge in Britain on the eve of the First World War – encompassing actions by women, workers, the Irish – and of the role of the Liberal Party, caught up in the maelstrom of the time. The parallel is by no means entirely apposite, of course, but one sentence in the book’s opening pages did catch my eye. The Liberals, Dangerfield writes, emerged from the fray ‘flushed with one of the greatest victories of all time’ yet, he adds, ‘from that victory they never recovered’ (1997:19). Something similar can be said of Frelimo, of the MPLA, of SWAPO, of ZANU and of the ANC. For these movements, although still ‘in power’, have come to preside over the death of the promise that they were once thought to epitomise and their victories, or at least the way they came about, are arguably ones from which they too may never recover. It is with this paradox in mind that I chose not only this title but that of one of my recent books – The Next Liberation Struggle. For such a ‘next liberation struggle’, I live in hope.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".