Looking Back on the Future History of the ‘Book’: The Council of Editors of Learned Journals Keynote Addresses MLA Convention 2002
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the last couple of years, the CELJ keynote addresses have featured speakers who have discussed some aspect of the advancing electronic world of scholarship. This year, I thought it might be profitable to bring what we know of the book's long history to bear on its future - electronic or otherwise. I looked for two leading experts with deep knowledge in the history of the book and editing to look back, as it were, on the future of the book. The academic journal, of course, is one permutation of the category ‘book.’ The idea of the ‘book,’ - or ‘a book’ - and of reading practices that give thela ‘book’ its life in the world, has become a fascinating topic at this historical moment when the technological possibilities of electronic formats have opened up the traditional limitations of the printed book and stimulated much consideration of what a book is or might become. Is the electronic context changing what a ‘book’ is? Or is it simply giving us a new vantage point from which to observe that it has never been quite so clear what we mean by ‘book’? And to what degree have we successfully negotiated the book in its newer guises? David Greetham approaches these issues through the lens of Foucault's notion of the ‘author,’ trying from several theoretical paths to attempt a spacious conceptualization of ‘book.’ George Bornstein then challenges editors, publishers, and scholars to address, in practical and outward-looking terms, the various (especially economic) pressures that are significantly limiting our ambitions for the electronic ‘book.’
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 | 0.018 | 0.044 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.058 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.035 | 0.018 |
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".