Psychosemiotic Cycles and the Liturgical Year: A Case Study and Framework for Research.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book sketches the outline of a psychosemiotic framework for studying "aesthetic-religious experiences", both within and beyond the Christian liturgy. Rejecting a simple dichotomy between religious/spiritual/mystical experiences (on the one hand) and aesthetic experiences (on the other), it is argued that they are essentially one and the same, and that any distinction between them consists in their contextualization (or "discernment") in relation to a body of doctrine - hence the unitary term "aesthetic-religious experience". It is proposed that such experiences are, in fact, altered states of consciousness, induced by deeply concentrated narrowed attention on a personally meaningful stimulus (or "symbol") which is perceived as particularly beautiful and pleasurable. Building on this foundation, the book goes on to focus especially on the relationship between aesthetic-religious experiences themselves and conventionalized patterns of narrating them. By means of a detailed case study of the cycle of seasonal prayers in a version of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the book shows how Martindale’s methodology of "narrative pattern analysis" - a combination of computer-assisted content analysis and statistical methods for the analysis of time-series data - can be used to explore hypotheses about the psychodynamic relationships between liturgical texts, liturgical and natural time, and the wider Christian tradition of narrating mystical experience. The book's theoretical foundations represent a practical synthesis of ancient and modern thought, and draw on psychological, semiotic, and aesthetic concepts taken from the (neo-)Thomistic and Franciscan scholastic traditions, the writings of the Canadian Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan, and modern psychoanalysis, psychology, and linguistics.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".