Illuminating a Culture, a History, a Tradition: Conceptual Blending in the St. John's Bible
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1998, St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota commissioned Donald Jackson to produce one of the first hand-written, hand-illuminated Bibles since the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. The on-going project bridges disparate traditions in a unique blend of the medieval and postmodern eras. This article adopts cognitive literary theory to examine the St. John's Bible, specifically the frontispiece to the Gospel of John, and the text-image interaction contained within as products of conceptual blending. A cognitive historical approach to the St. John's Bible reveals the complicated relationship of the modern-day audience to the illuminated text. Tensions are inevitable within any cognitive blend; the same applies to the reader-viewer's experience of text-image integration here. The key to cognitive blending is the emergent experience of the target element. In this case, the postmodern Bible as target blends with its medieval predecessors to produce the St. John's Bible-an intersubjective, multimodal, cross-generational artifact of a cognitive blend.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".