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RETHINKING BITUMEN: FROM “BULLSHIT” TO A “MATTER OF CONCERN”

2012· article· en· W2319174906 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Jonathan Gordon

Bibliographic record

VenueImaginations Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies · 2012
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicWater Governance and Infrastructure
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAsphaltHistoryArchaeology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

What is the current state of discourse about bitumen and how might it be changed? Philosopher Harry Frankfurt defines “bullshit” as any attempt at persuasion that is “unconnected to a concern with the truth” (Frankfurt). By looking at a variety of recent examples from the debates over bitumen extraction, “Rethinking Bitumen” argues that these debates have many of the characteristics that Frankfurt ascribes to “bullshit.” It is argued further that the debate’s disconnect from a concern with truth is rooted in what Bruno Latour calls “matters of fact” (“Critique” 226). Attempts to persuade are built on “matters of fact”—which can be debunked by both sides as ideological—when they should be founded on the ecological consciousness of what Latour calls “matters of concern” (ibid.) Literature offers one means of effecting this transition from “matters of fact” to “matters of concern.” This article considers Marc Prescott’s play Fort Mac as one example of a literary text that creates an opportunity for engaging in ecological thinking about bitumen and for deploying affect and sensation to change the prevailing values about it, to see bitumen as a “matter of concern.”

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)0.010
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.018
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.990
Threshold uncertainty score0.074

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0100.018
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0100.098
Scholarly communication0.0160.026
Open science0.0020.007
Research integrity0.0070.010
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.057
GPT teacher head0.435
Teacher spread0.377 · 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.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
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
Published2012
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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