The Bias Against Communication: On the Neglect and Non-publication of the "Incomplete and Unrevised Manuscript" of Harold Adams Innis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Harold Adams Innis' "A History of Communications" has attained almost mythological status within his oeuvres, and is widely recognized as an important repository of his ideas. Yet the work (numbering some 2,400 pages) has never been published, and its significance for understanding Innis' scholarship has yet to be assessed. This paper examines why a number of efforts to publish the work met with failure, giving particular attention to a venture supported by the CRTC in 1969-70, as viewed through the eyes of Mary Quayle Innis and those advising her (particularly Northrup Frye, Donald Innis, and George Ferguson). The paper concludes with an overview of the manuscript's contents, along with some of the organizing principles that underpinned the empirical material that Innis presents. Such an exercise, I argue, is essential if one is to address whether the document merits publication in some form.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".