The Decadent Archive and the Long History of New Media
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Responding to the assertion of this special issue, that our “new media moment” has a long history, this article looks at one particular moment in 1890s when theories of decadence within British Aestheticism led to experiments in the periodical press. These experiments were conscious attempts to investigate how print media influenced perceptions of both literary content and the cultural practices of modernity. Specifically, I argue that Leonard Smithers’s publication of the short-lived Savoy in 1896 offers an interesting model of self-aware critical reflection for our own contemporary experiments with the digital archive. I compare Smithers’s periodical with the example of The Yellow Nineties Online (www.1890s.ca), a digital archive with its own self-conscious approach that allows for a decadent space of self-reflexive conversation about media circulation in its printed past and digital future. Rather than reading our current new media moment as the end of a previous tradition, I propose that we in the humanities have an opportunity, similar to Smithers’s in the 1890s, to archive our own media moment with digital texts that tell their stories from a self-reflexive, ironic, and mutable decadent perspective.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".