A Progress Report on The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses the early history, current publications, and future directions of the The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive (PPEA). It begins with account of the project’s origins in computer assisted analysis of Middle English alliterative meter in the mid-1980s and describes some of the technical challenges facing early digital editing projects. It then discusses the project’s current and forthcoming documentary editions of Piers Plowman manuscripts and its early work on the B archetype, concentrating on the challenges posed by this heterogeneous tradition. The first appendix describes a list of new manuscript sigils used by the PPEA to avoid problems caused by the traditional, ad hoc, system.The second appendix describes features of the new Elwood browser, which will be used for forthcoming volumes in the PPEA.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.074 | 0.021 |
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".