Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the academic study of religion, the words “method” and “theory” possess an immutable, authoritative aura and typically function to amplify the legitimacy of any given study. What is more ambiguous, however, is whether those of us engaged in the study of religion actually have a shared understanding of these terms, and whether we are sufficiently attentive to the way in which we use them. Given this ambiguity, and given how pervasive “method” and “theory” are in our field, scholars of religion should be (in the words of J.Z. Smith) “relentlessly self-conscious” and give some consideration to how our discipline has appropriated these terms. Ultimately, I argue that attention to their genealogy can help us better orient ourselves when it comes to deploying “method” and “theory” in our studies.
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 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 | 0.112 | 0.081 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.113 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".