Toward a Social Practice Perspective on the Work of Reading Inscriptions in Science Texts
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the social studies of science, visuals and graphical representations are theorized by means of the concept of inscription, a term that denotes all representations other than text inscribed in some medium including graphs, tables, photographs, and equations. Inscriptions constitute an intrinsic and integral part of scientific practice; their development and the development of science are tightly interwoven. A focus on inscription therefore goes together with the social psychological study of the cultural practices that embed inscriptions. Thus, scientists produce line graphs to convincingly show relationships; they use histograms to show distributions; or they combine multiple graphs to show contrasts or correlations between different entities and contexts. Inscriptions are also present in school science textbooks with great frequency and high school science activities, including teaching, demonstrations, and laboratory tasks. However, to read inscriptions successfully, students need to develop a special kind of literacy that is related to the use of inscriptions, which, in turn, is tied to the way in which these inscriptions are produced within an authentic science environment. The situated and highly contextualized nature of inscriptions renders them meaningful only within and through particular interpretive practices that are developed concomitantly with their production and use in authentic science settings, to which students may not have access in their daily school activities. Moreover, the representational (rhetorical) power of an inscription is related to the amount of information it may carry and to its level of abstractness, which are also proportional to its complexity and, thus, to the difficulty in reading it. In this article, we review the literature on reading inscriptions in science contexts from a social practice perspective as it has by and large emerged during the past two decades.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| 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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it