Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores questions of the permissible and the impermissible in breast cancer narratives. It deploys (inter alia) a theory of discourse and counterdiscourse to argue that the genre itself of the personal narrative performs a regulatory function in public discourse on cancer. The paper is inspired by an idea introduced into science studies by Schiebinger and Proctor—the idea of agnotology: the cultural production of ignorance. The paper argues that ignorance about cancer is maintained, in part, by the rehearsal of stories that have standard plots and features, and that suppress or displace other stories. The paper turns on examples of both conventional and unconventional stories. It focuses on Barbara Ehrenreich’s renegade cancer story and its public reception, and Wendy Mesley’s renegade cancer television documentary and the public reception of that. The paper seeks to contribute to genre studies by analyzing instances of a genre of public discourse, and suggesting the nature of the social action performed by the genre itself.
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 | 0.009 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| 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".