Algorithmic love: “Quit playin’ games with my <3”
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some of the rich history of the <3 is laced with myths and monsters, and reveals this particular cipher is anything but a trivial emoticon: rather, its ambiguous affective weight makes it an ideal interface for the ineffable. This conceptual essay is an exploration through a different approach to the traditional visual essay. Here, the author-composed photo-collages function as a meditation on a theme by pondering and theorizing along with the text, ideas of the heart emoticon in the fractal matrix of sign types, with some of the multiple possibilities and implications associated with its use by both individuals and corporations. Paralleling the subject/object relations figured forth through the Medusa myth, with the idea that not knowing about the algorithmic influences on the <3 of intimate digital messaging may serve to turn the subject into an object. This paper thus calls for algorithmic literacies, broadly conceived as agility in critically discerning how decision-making is presented to the individual in matters of the <3.
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 imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it