Expectations and utility in eighteenth-century knowledge economies <i>Notes and Records</i> special issue introduction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Creating a sketch, a plan or a model for the future is often closely related to endeavouring to predict what it may yield. It is also a process that stabilizes contemporary portrayals of social realities, including those aspects understood as problems, or in need of improvement. As Sang-Hyun Kim and Sheila Jasanoff have shown in their work on ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’, frequently plans and ‘visions of scientific and technological progress’ act as vehicles for communicating ideas, implicitly and explicitly, about ‘public purposes, collective futures and the common good’ in a particular historical moment.1 Plans and sketchy visions for the future are worthy of study in their own right, even if they are never realized, because of the efforts to organize expectations and to assimilate ideas about what is (and is not) in the ‘public interest’ that they purport to represent.2 Attending to the origins and expectations inducing projects of envisioning the future, that is, attending to ‘dreamscapes’ that may or may not have been realized in the long eighteenth century, is a major task of this special issue. All of the essays take as their starting point that the imagined futures of this period reveal a distinct constellation of agendas, moral imperatives and politics. Indeed, the eighteenth century was full of dreamscapes. Their makers routinely devised particular categories and practices to both articulate and, in some cases, to actually build the imagined futures they desired—or claimed to desire. In this period's ‘knowledge economy’, a term now generally associated with the work of economic historian Joel Mokyr, makers of dreamscapes and professional analysts of the future were often called ‘projectors’ or ‘project makers’.3 This particular cadre of ‘dreamscapers’ tended to anchor their visions in sketches, schemes or plans for improvement(s). Mokyr focused on the British context during the dramatic …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".