<i>Material Texts in Early Modern England</i> . By <scp>Adam Smyth</scp> <i>Material Texts in Early Modern England</i> . By SmythAdam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2018. x + 211 pp. £75. <scp>isbn</scp> 978 1 108 42132 4.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Is the book broken—as an artefact, as an economic entity, as a metaphor, as an experience of common life? That question has been asked in various forms for nearly five decades, prompted by the replacement of hot metal by phototypesetting, the absorption of historic publishing houses into large conglomerates, the extreme scepticism of much current critical practice, and the physical disappearance of deeply loved books into the digisphere. The task of asking and responding to the question falls to the bibliographer, or as he or she has latterly become known, the book historian, a term that at the moment seems to cover anyone who tries to put together a picture of what the book is and where it might be going. Traditional bibliography in the century and a half since Bradshaw has focused intensely but controversially on the book as a material object, but there is much evidence that as Adam Smyth contends, this leads to an unprofitable argument about ‘hard’ practice and its superior relation to ‘soft’ theory. His new book attempts to steer between the two, or rather to bring them into a fruitful relationship, removing the seeming binary opposition. Smyth has certainly done the hard work; he begins by telling us how heavy an iron Model number 4 printing press is, having bought one and with his friend Dennis manhandled it into his study, where they couldn't lift it onto the desk. The first thing the Smyth chapel did was to set and print four lines of a Keith Douglas poem, ‘Stars’. Ruefully, Smyth concludes, ‘Printing brings errors into being with an astonishing frequency: it is difficult to appreciate how hard it is to set even the most unremarkable line of blank verse with any kind of accuracy until one tries’ (p. 5).
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.114 | 0.031 |
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".