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Record W2585288324 · doi:10.1111/area.12329

On absence and abundance: biography as method in archival research

2017· article· en· W2585288324 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Jake Hodder

Bibliographic record

VenueArea · 2017
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicData Analysis and Archiving
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersArts and Humanities Research CouncilUniversity of CambridgeMcGill University
KeywordsScholarshipBiographySociologyScope (computer science)Space (punctuation)EpistemologyHistoryPolitical scienceLawArt historyComputer sciencePhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Geographical scholarship has rightly problematised the act of archival research, showing how the practice of archiving is not only concerned with how a society collectively remembers, but also forgets. As such, the dominant motif for discussing historical methods in geography has been through the lens of absence: the archive is a space of 'traces', 'fragments' and 'ghosts'. In this paper I suggest that the focus on incompleteness and partiality, while true, may also belie what many geographers working in archives find their greatest difficulty: an overwhelming volume of source materials. I reflect on my own research experiences in the pacifist archive to suggest that the growing scale and scope of many collections, along with the taxing research demands of transnational perspectives, pose immediate practical challenges for geographers characterised as much by abundance as by absence. In the second half of the paper, drawing on recent scholarship in history and geography, I argue that the method of biography offers one possible strategy for navigating archival abundance, allowing geographers to tell stories that are wider, deeper and more revealingly complex within the existing time and financial constraints of humanities research.

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)0.126
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.180
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.126
Threshold uncertainty score0.668

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.1260.180
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.001
Bibliometrics0.0100.010
Science and technology studies0.0140.155
Scholarly communication0.0300.053
Open science0.0040.026
Research integrity0.0040.009
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.117
GPT teacher head0.494
Teacher spread0.377 · 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 designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreMethods

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

Citations49
Published2017
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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