AHR Conversation: Walls, Borders, and Boundaries in World History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since 2006, the AHR has published nine “Conversations,” each on a subject of interest to a wide range of historians.1 For each the process has been the same: the Editor convenes a group of scholars with an interest in the topic, who, via e-mail over the course of several months, conduct a conversation, which is then lightly edited and footnoted, finally appearing (with one exception) in the December issue. The goal has been to provide readers with a wide-ranging consideration of a topic at a high level of expertise, in which the participants are recruited across several fields and periods. It is the sort of publishing project that this journal is uniquely positioned to undertake. This year’s topic, “Walls, Borders, and Boundaries in World History,” has an obvious contemporary relevance, most dramatically in the calls to “Build That Wall” that were a shrill trope in the recent U.S. presidential campaign. Beyond this, the specter of building walls, defending borders, and reasserting boundaries haunts political life in many parts of the world, from the wall separating Israel and the Palestinian territories; to the potential redrawing of the boundaries of several nation-states, as regions—Kurdistan in Afghanistan, Catalonia in Spain—attempt to assert their independence; to the oft-heard pleas for borders to be policed or even closed in the face of what seems to be a worldwide refugee crisis. Contemporary public discourse on this subject is usually cast in moral terms: walls are seen as either good or bad; boundaries and borders are viewed either as regrettable obstacles to the virtues of openness and cosmopolitanism or as necessary to keep out things and people deemed undesirable. Our conversation will certainly attend to the contemporary aspects of our topic, but we want to add a historical perspective to thinking about “walls, borders, and boundaries,” while also remaining alert to the methodological and theoretical problems encountered in attempting to make sense of the many different phenomena and experiences evoked by our topic.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.003 |
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".