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Record W2486587190 · doi:10.1017/ccol9780521859868.014

David Hume: “The Historian”

2008· book-chapter· en· W2486587190 on OpenAlexaff
David Wootton

Bibliographic record

VenueCambridge University Press eBooks · 2008
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicBorges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPhilosophyHistoryEpistemologyArt historyPsychoanalysisPsychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The first volume of Hume's History of England, dealing with the early Stuarts, appeared in 1754. The final volumes, covering the period from the invasion of Julius Caesar to 1485, appeared in 1762, although Hume was occupied with revisions of the whole work until his death. In writing history, Hume was partly creating, partly responding to, a new market. In 1757 he thought history “the most popular kind of writing of any” (HL 1:244). In 1770 he wrote, “I believe this is the historical Age and this [Scotland] the historical Nation” (HL 2:230). He knew of no fewer than eight histories that were currently being written. The year before, in England, he had declared, “History, I think, is the Favourite Reading” (HL 2:196). Hume and his friend William Robertson were in large part responsible for this new popularity of history, much of it written by Scotsmen for English readers. Hume himself had received unprecedented payments for his History (for which he sold the copyright on each volume, rather than collecting royalties): he made at least £3,200 on the whole, at a time when a friend of his could consider himself well to do on £80 per annum (HL1:193, 255, 266, 314). Although in practice his History seems to have sold less well during his lifetime than the various volumes of his Essays, Hume was consistently of the opinion that this was his bookseller's fault. The market for history books was potentially far larger (HL 2:106, 229, 233, 242).

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.007
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.024
Threshold uncertainty score0.081

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.007
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0040.006
Scholarly communication0.0060.007
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0020.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0240.012

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.

Opus teacher head0.039
GPT teacher head0.177
Teacher spread0.138 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

Quick stats

Citations39
Published2008
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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