Bibliographic record
Abstract
Consider the so-called decorator crab. As it moves across the sea floor, it covers itself with debris, such as bits of algae and sponge, which it attaches to the small hooked hairs that cover its carapace. Most critical essays proceed in a similar manner. Bristling with snipped-off quotations, footnotes and bibliographical references, they adopt a protective coloration that allows them to pass unharmed through intellectual deep waters. Nor is this only superficial decoration: the body of the essay is often assembled from wideranging sources, which in their conjunction may form an idea quite different from any one of its components. The present essay is no exception to this rule. It assembles itself out of bits and pieces of Freud, Piaget, Levi-Strauss and Baudrillard; and its examples are drawn from artists in various media: Joseph Cornell, Elizabeth Bishop, Edward Gorey and Donald Barthelme. That debris (no disrespect is intended) is assembled here precisely in order to make a point about the ways that debris is assembled – the ways that, in the first instance, material residues give rise to certain narrative arrangements, which are never so thoroughly assembled that they escape from under the sign of debris. They have now been translated into mental debris, and as a consequence partake in the kinds of associative processes that also give rise to dreams. Narratologists have expended much effort in the attempt to lay out narrative’s syntax. But the structuring principles of narrative may be more akin to those of the decorator crab than to those of the grammarian. Within the drowned world of debris, narrative and dream clasp hands. Joseph Cornell supplies our first example of such an encounter. On April 15, 1946, he took time out from constructing his boxes of assembled objects to clean up his workspace. That night Cornell wrote in his diary: “Had satisfactory feeling about clearing up debris on cellar floor—‘sweepings’ represent all the rich crosscurrents ramifications etc that go into the boxes but which are not apparent (I feel at least) in the final result” (Cornell 128). While it is common enough for an artist to feel that the completed work has fallen short of the vision, it is less common for an artist to locate that vision in the work’s material leftovers—in sweepings, debris, the residues of the
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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".