Science for the Chinese Common Reader? Myriad Treasures and New Knowledge at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
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
Argument This article argues that in order to discern the place of science in the epistemology of Chinese common readers, it is critical to look beyond the coastal enclaves where foreign missionaries and experts interacted with Chinese scholars and officials, beyond the translated treatises they produced, and even beyond the various forms of new media that attempted to more widely disseminate the principles of Western science. Instead, it asserts the need to engage a different register of materials that were less directly tied to foreign expertise, more directly in line with pre-existing lineages of printed materials, and at the same time, integral to early-twentieth-century Chinese circuits of information. The article focuses explicitly on one print phenomena that has been completely overlooked in the scholarship to date, the expansion and revitalization of the genre of texts known as wanbao quanshu (comprehensive compendia of myriad treasures) in the late Qing (1890-1911) and early Republic (1912-1930).
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 | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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