AHR<i>Conversation: Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the last few years, the AHR has published four “Conversations,” each on a subject of interest to a wide range of historians: “On Transnational History” (2006), “Religious Identities and Violence” (2007), “Environmental Historians and Environmental Crisis” (2008), and “Historians and the Study of Material Culture” (2009). For each the process has been the same: the Editor convenes a group of scholars with an interest in the topic, who, via e-mail over the course of several months, conduct a conversation, which is then lightly edited and footnoted, finally appearing in the December issue. The goal has been to provide readers with a wide-ranging consideration of an important topic at a high level of expertise, in which the participants are recruited across several fields and periods. It is the sort of publishing project that this journal is uniquely positioned to undertake. In a sense, this year's topic, “Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information,” pays homage to the very process that enables the AHR Conversation in the first place. After all, this project would have been inconceivable before the Internet and electronic mail made possible the kind of instantaneous communication that we now largely take for granted. One has to be rather young not to marvel at the ease of communicating and staying connected in this era of Facebook and the Web. Interestingly, however, one of the themes of the following discussion is the need to reject the kind of thinking that celebrates (or perhaps bemoans) technological developments in communication in terms of “rupture” or other such proclamations of new media “ages.” Rather, the participants call our attention not so much to dramatic transformations as to the actual modes, techniques, and social interactions that have characterized communication in all times and places.
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 | 0.029 | 0.049 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.051 | 0.038 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.004 |
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".