Media Archaeology, Cultural Techniques, and the Middle Ages: An Approach to the Study of Media before the Media
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article surveys recent work in media archaeology, explicates the related theory of cultural techniques, and considers the utility of these recent developments in new German media theory to the analysis of medieval and early modern mediality. In doing so, the article also attends to disciplinary similarities between media studies and medieval and early modern studies. The aim of the article is neither to suggest a hybridization of these fields nor to systematize the approaches of media archaeology and the study of cultural techniques, but rather to highlight productive points of contact, contention, and possible exchange, and to indicate avenues for future research on insufficiently studied topics in medieval and early modern mediality. As a point of reference for this theoretical overview, the article focuses on Nicholas of Cusa’s treatise On the Vision of God (De visione Dei, 1453) and mentions other examples from medieval German literature and culture where relevant.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 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".