Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article draws on a speech made at the Ruth First Symposium in London in June 2012. It describes Ruth First's role as a writer, political organiser and mobiliser of the freedom struggle within and without South Africa, drawing attention to her intellectual contribution and underscoring the importance of her Maputo years, with their broader significance. It discusses the personal tensions that many had with her, but points out that there was always a political issue at stake in these disagreements. It stresses her role as a scholar-activist, and following Brecht suggests that her assassination was an attempt by the assassins to ‘sleep more comfortably’. It then draws powerfully on a letter from Rusty Bernstein to pose the question of what First would have made of the contemporary situation in South Africa, where the ‘Empire of Capital’ is still dominant.
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 | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".