Jesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri's Mission to Tibet. By Trent Pomplun
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jesuit on the Roof of the World by Trent Pomplun is the first major treatment of the mission to Tibet undertaken by the Tuscan Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733), one of the earliest European students of that land and its peoples. Since World War II, only Italians have paid much attention to Desideri in his own right; in English-language scholarship, he has appeared primarily in Tibetan Studies. Enzo Bargiacchi's recent studies of Desideri are brief and difficult to find, though his excellent bibliography lays the groundwork for scholarship like Pomplun's.1 The importance of global and cultural travelers like Desideri, and the usefulness of studies of his life and work, steadily increases as scholars become more interested in early-modern networks and the world-historical questions they produce. Unfortunately, this book has appeared too early to take into account the investigations of Alison Gopnik, who has shown the very real possibility that Desideri unintentionally served as a conduit through which ideas from Tibetan Buddhism could reach David Hume, influencing his thought and, therefore, the European Enlightenment more generally.2
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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.
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".