MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2541395596 · doi:10.1111/lic3.12346

Darwin, Paratext and the Modes of Knowing

2016· article· en· W2541395596 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueLiterature Compass · 2016
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicThemes in Literature Analysis
Canadian institutionsBrock University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsParatextDarwin (ADL)PsychologyLiteratureLinguisticsArtPhilosophyComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This paper examines the relation between the verse stanzas and the prose notes (both the extensive footnotes and the even more extensive “additional notes”) of Erasmus or The Origin of Society: A Poem. With Philosophic Notes (1803) in an effort to engage with the complex interweaving of science and literature that forms Darwin's work and increasingly informs Romantic Studies. Beginning with the simple assertion that the notes are far more integral to the text than the subordination implied in the titular “with” might suggest – in fact, that the notes are, in some important ways, the point of the text – I argue that what critics often refer to as Darwin's “masterwork” interrogates the very notion of “mastery” itself by working at once to perform and to foster a critical sense of what we might call “interdisciplinarity”: an effort neither to erect nor to erode disciplinary boundaries at points of intersection but an interest in engaging with the “space” of the boundary itself. As Darwin notes in the preface, “The Poem, which is here offered to the Public, does not pretend to instruct by deep researches of reasoning; its aim is simply to amuse by bringing distinctly to the imagination the beautiful and sublime images of the operations of Nature in the order, as the Author believes, in which the progressive course of time presented them.” On the one hand, this claim clearly conveys Darwin's concern with instruction, with “bringing distinctly to the imagination” and the “deep researches of reasoning,” even as it downplays; perhaps, more “traditional” modes of teaching and even, by extension, works to revise our understanding of what is worth teaching. On the other hand, it suggests that a Romantic concern with the beautiful and sublime is as at home in the “deep researches of reasoning” and the “operations of Nature” as it is in any poem. And, however, we may choose to inflect that claim; the text is more than simply a didactic poem teaching a proto‐evolutionary, clearly medicalized version of biological, sociological and cultural development. It is an extensive commentary on the interrelation of the medical and the social, the biological and the poetic and, not least, on the nature of didacticism itself, on the hows and whys of instructing and learning in an environment and at a time when the limits of the known and the knowable and the sense of promise and anxiety fostered by changing disciplinary boundaries were under constant scrutiny. By examining the interaction between the “main” text and the paratext, I explore how one of the period's most diverse thinkers and writers negotiated the diversity of knowledge and modes of knowing that made his work so popular and influential and, most importantly, how he taught and can still teach ways for readers to manage the critical if contentious interdisciplinarity that will continue to dominate our own deep researches.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.951
Threshold uncertainty score0.634

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.012
GPT teacher head0.215
Teacher spread0.203 · 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