Of Billy’s Time: Temporality in Melville’s <i>Billy Budd</i>
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
Abstract: Billy Budd is replete with invocations of various temporalities. This article brings the tale’s “juggling temporalities” to bear upon the questions of sexuality that the story also addresses and shows that Billy Budd is a searching exploration of (and meditation on) the profound historicity of sexuality. Unfinished and unpublished at the time of Melville’s death, the extant manuscript of Billy Budd is a complicated palimpsest of additions and revisions. Reconstructing the genealogy of the manuscript’s development reveals that Melville moved the action back in time; made Billy younger; added, at different stages of composition, the characters of Claggart (the “homosexual in the text,” according to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s well-known reading) and Captain Vere. But there are several homosexuals in the text, who, although they ostensibly co-exist in one time and place, nevertheless belong to different historical regimes of sexuality.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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