The Electronic Muse: The Council of Editors of Learned Journals Keynote Addresses, MLA Convention 2001
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Picking up with CELJ's MLA 2000 topic on ways that the digital world is changing, and often guiding, copyright law and fair use in scholarly publishing (see JSP, April 2002), the Council of Editors of Learned Journals asked its keynote speakers for the 2001 MLA Convention to address two different faces of the ‘electronic muse.’ Patrick Harrison, who brings an expertise in law to concerns about the ramifications of the recent New York Times v. Tasini case on publishing electronic databases, discovers that at heart in the issue of copyright protection is the very definition of revision, which surprisingly has never been discussed in prior case law. What constitutes an electronic revision of a collective work such as a newspaper, magazine, or journal, and therefore a legitimate republication, according to copyright law, in electronic form such as a for-profit database? The Supreme Court came down on the side of protecting individual authors: the publication in an electronic database of a work originally appearing in a print journal or other collective work is not a revision but a new work. In stressing a text as material property at the centre of competing claims of ownership, this decision leaves open to question the status of a text's intellectual or creative relation to its community and to the common good. Ian Lancashire, a professor of poetry, has nimbly side-stepped the nettles of Net law in offering poetry for free to the world through an anthology of online poetry. His Representative Poetry Online (RPO) features over 2,500 English poems by 403 poets, nearly all in the public domain. Indeed, it is the public nature of this project, its conception of poetry and its study as a collaborative enterprise between scholarly editor and common reader, that safeguards its haven in the electronic world. This e-anthology challenges the concept of a poetic text as the product of individual genius whose access need be regulated by an elite class of academic professionals. Representative Poetry Online instead perpetuates the ‘representative’ life of poetry as belonging to the world. Existing online, this poetry is able to enter the very material lives of its readers.
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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 | 0.034 | 0.079 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.058 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.032 | 0.024 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.062 | 0.040 |
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".