A brief history of markup of social science data: from punched cards to "the life cycle" approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Traditional quantitative social science data analysis requires three ingredients: the raw data, metadata (what we used to call a codebook), and software. Software changes all the time, within some limits. Raw data without metadata is useless: it might as well be generated by a random number generator. And metadata without data is like the index to a periodical the last remaining copy of which was sent for recycling last month. Over time, metadata have been expected to support many different functions, and microsolutions have never quite satisfied many, much less all, of those functions. Until recently, that is: a roughly 25-year process of historical evolution has led to DDI, the Data Documentation Initiative, which unites several levels of metadata in one emerging standard.
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 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 | 0.010 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.005 |
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".