Introduction: “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this cluster of essays, a group of scholars from different disciplines-History, Comparative Literature, American Studies, and Literature and Media Studies-offers reflections upon a broadly construed question: what does it mean for the humanities to address the concept of the Anthropocene?We have, quite intentionally, included essays that vary with regard to materials and approaches.What they share is a concern with the challenges of representing a concept at once wholly abstract and alarmingly material in aesthetically, rhetorically, and ultimately politically efficacious ways.They share as well a conviction that the humanities, in their attention to the creation and critique of aesthetic objects, can play a significant role in heightening public environmental awareness.The problem they collectively address is a curious, but pervasive one in environmentalism: why does it seem that widely accepted science and widely shared framing paradigms have such limited effect on the various public audiences that they attempt and need to reach?How, too, might that be changed?The claim that we have entered a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene was first made by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000 (and elaborated upon by Crutzen in an article published in Nature in 2002). 1 Originally defined as the age in which humanity came to have an impact upon long-term geological processes, it now stresses that our species has become a crucially significant factor in potentially cataclysmic climatological and biogeographical changes.Especially since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has exerted an increasingly powerful influence over the Earth's ecosystems, changing not only the planet's surface appearance, but also its chemistry and geology.Indeed,
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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 | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 0.009 |
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".