Database of Religious History and the Study of Ancient Mediterranean Religiosity
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
As a quantitative and qualitative encyclopaedia of religious cultural history, the Database of Religious History (DRH) opens for historians new and exciting avenues of research. Some of these avenues complement and cohere with existing research practices, while others supplement and even expand the horizons of scholarly inquiry and imagination. In this article I explore the function and utility of the DRH when studying a specific geo-temporal locale (namely, the ancient Mediterranean) and the many expressions of religion that exist within that historical space (namely, ancient Mediterranean religiosity). My aim is twofold. On the one hand, I demonstrate the utility of the DRH, specifically showing how this database project confronts, even embraces, the challenges posed by historical sources. On the other hand, I highlight promising avenues that are opened up by the DRH in addressing a specific problem within the scholarly study of ancient Mediterranean religiosity (namely, the question of whether we should we speak of religion or religions in the ancient Mediterranean). My discussion concludes with reflection on the intersection of the DRH with cognitive historiography, specifically with respect to the inherent interdisciplinarity of both projects.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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