‘Route Work’ through Alternative Archives: Reflections on Cross-Disciplinary Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Five Hundred Year Initiative stresses the value of cross-disciplinary perspectives in investigating the antecedents of contemporary southern African societies, with archaeological sources playing a prominent role in its associated projects. To produce effective histories, these projects require analytical attention to both the processes that gave rise to contemporary societies and those that shape history making in the present. In this article, I build on Paul Gilroy's notion of ‘route work’ (by comparison to ‘root work’) to explore the value and methodological challenges of constructing historical understandings that simultaneously attend to the dynamics of past cultural practice and the processes through which our understandings of those practices are produced. Drawing on examples from Ghana, I argue that a methodological engagement with the negotiated quality of historical understanding – an approach that brings into view our processes of ‘coming to know’ – lays the groundwork for an ethically engaged and responsive, at the same time as empirically grounded, understanding of past socio-historical processes.
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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 | 0.026 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".