Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay, Michael Real reflects on why communication about sport is of cultural importance and worthy of critical study. The early part of the essay reflects on challenges faced in the development of the study of communication and sport and the author’s involvement in that development. The author reflects on his choice to focus on spectacle and mega-events, such as media treatment of the Super Bowl and the Olympic Games. The essay traces significant influences and “schools” of critical approaches to communication and sport, from small beginnings in the 1970s through rapid expansion of topics and methods in the 1980s and since. Key historic contributions that have influenced research on communication and sport are examined along with conflicts about how to best approach this subject. The focus section of the essay assesses a number of broad theoretical lenses that have value in studying mediated sport’s mega-events as spectacle. Considered here are a Geertz style approach to ritual analysis, Debord’s society of the spectacle, and Roche’s theory of mega-events. The essay closes with comment on the road ahead for scholarly research on communication and sport.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.003 |
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".