Acts of Aesthetics: Publishing as Recursive Agency in the Long Eighteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Of primary concern to late eighteenth-century society was the sheer volume of printed work being produced in England. The response of authors troubled by this perceived crisis was an outpouring of works on taste, aesthetics, genre and literature, which attempted to describe and provide corrective solutions to the problem of over-publication. Yet this response itself, of course, only added to the number of works within Britain. How did the solution to a deluge of print become more printed materials? Did these authors envision print’s agency as a self-corrective process? And, if so, how can we recover and perhaps even model the connections between works that encompassed the responses to print? This essay outlines a potential solution to this problem by sampling a highly focused selection of digitized texts that raise the issue of over-publication. Through a quantitative analysis of these texts, it identifies the lexical patterns that may reveal the ways in which authors of the period envisioned the work of aesthetics. In particular, this article identifies an emerging consensus on how printed objects became agents within the socio-cultural world of the long eighteenth century: both as objects which could act on readers and as objects which could act on other printed texts. By comparing the language that these clusters of texts deploy to discuss the agency of print to their traditional generic, theoretical or historical groupings, we can begin to examine the process by which the potential power of print became the solution to the dangers it, itself, presented.
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 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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".