Urs App . The Birth of Orientalism . (Encounters with Asia.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2010. Pp. xviii, 550. $79.95.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Urs App's book offers an account of eighteenth-century European (mostly French) thinkers who wrote on the religions and philosophies of Asia east of the Indus River, particularly the attempt to fit Hinduism and Buddhism into an overarching history of culture. The seventeenth century had seen a certain amount of European engagement with Arabic and Persian texts, and by 1700 there was a Jesuit-fueled explosion of interest in China (especially Confucius). It was during the eighteenth century, however, that the degree of European engagement with Indian textual traditions saw the greatest growth, from almost nothing at the century's beginning to, by its end, the work of William Jones and others on the connection between Sanskrit and Greek. App's argument mirrors that of the Enlightenment tradition in European Indology that he reconstructs. Enlightened thinkers from Voltaire onward used Indian ancient texts to “relativize” Christianity as part of an emergent comparative history of...
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.016 |
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".