Narrating the Unspeakable: Interdisciplinary Readings of Jean-Dominuque Bauby's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly, by Jean-Dominique Bauby, recounts the author's experience of "locked-in syndrome" (LIS) following a massive stroke in December 1995. 1 This book has achieved exceptional success: translated from French into twenty-three languages, it sold over a million copies in a remarkably short time. Its popularity may be attributed in part to the author's high profile as editor of the French version of Elle magazine and to the extreme and horrific nature of the sudden transformation of his life. Yet the book's popularity may have as much to do with the form of the story he tells, the style and tone with which it is conveyed, and the way the account is recorded. The inaudible voice of the paralyzed narrator reaches us in spite of almost insurmountable obstacles, thanks to a code that enables him to communicate by blinking his one mobile eyelid. A man bereft of almost all that previously defined him, including his voice, manages to convey the unspeakable. He redeploys his skills as a professional writer, producing a text located at the intersections of literature and medicine.
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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".