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Record W2207593219 · doi:10.5325/preternature.4.2.0181

Superstition, Testimony, and the Eighteenth-Century Vampire Debates

2015· article· en· W2207593219 on OpenAlexaff
Kathryn Morris

Bibliographic record

VenuePreternature Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural · 2015
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicGothic Literature and Media Analysis
Canadian institutionsUniversity of King's College
Fundersnot available
KeywordsVampireSuperstitionSkepticismDilemmaHistoryPsychoanalysisNatural (archaeology)PsychologyLiteratureEpistemologyPhilosophyArt

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

ABSTRACT In the late seventeenth century, reports of vampire attacks began to emerge out of eastern Europe. These stories became the focus of a scholarly debate that centered on whether the events described in the vampire reports could possibly be true and, if so, how they ought to be explained. The reports presented a dilemma: although the events they described were implausible, the reports were often supported by testimony from reliable sources. This article will explore two eighteenth-century interventions in the vampire debate, and consider how they responded to this tension. Augustin Calmet carefully documented and examined the vampire reports, using established natural philosophical models for the study of strange phenomena. Despite Calmet's rational methods and skeptical conclusions, his work on vampires was vociferously attacked by Voltaire. I will argue that the encounter between Calmet and Voltaire illustrates their different ways of understanding the relationship among superstition, knowledge-production, and testimony.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.008
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.027
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.010
Threshold uncertainty score0.044

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0080.027
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0100.034
Scholarly communication0.0070.006
Open science0.0010.005
Research integrity0.0040.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.060
GPT teacher head0.314
Teacher spread0.254 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2015
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

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