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Record W2903824007 · doi:10.7202/1054312ar

For an anthropology of historians

2018· article· en· W2903824007 on OpenAlexaffvenue
Van Troi Tran, Patrick-Michel Noël

Bibliographic record

VenueEthnologies · 2018
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAnthropological Studies and Insights
Canadian institutionsUniversité de Saint-BonifaceUniversité Laval
Fundersnot available
KeywordsReflexivityScrutinyNarrativeCraftEthnographyEpistemologySociologyAestheticsHistory of anthropologyHistoryAnthropologyLiteratureArtPhilosophyLawPolitical scienceArchaeology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The cliché is still lively: historians, as is well known, tend to portray themselves as craftsmen or artisans, mastering a practical know-how learned patiently through hands-on experience with dusty documents, and showing a conspicuous disdain towards theory and abstractions. This image deserves closer scrutiny. It is interesting that despite this insistence on the craftlike image of the profession, there seems to be a lack of ethnographic investigations of historians at work that would precisely pay attention to the craftiness of history and the multiple practicalities of doing history across different contexts. The idea that historians just do what they do sounds simple enough, but as is the case with any “craft,” from basket weaving to hunting in the rainforest, it is hardly self-evident, either technically or sociologically. To be sure, there are plenty of biographies, autobiographies, “ego-histories,” methodological primers and epistemological essays that tackle and debate the problems of the working historian, but these reflexive narratives remain essentially vertical. Taking our cue from some of the recent developments in science studies and the anthropology of science, we would like to propose in this article a program for a horizontal study of historians, that would be independent of their own reflexive discourse and symmetric in its explanations, and that would be attentive to the varieties of their existence and their becoming in a community of practice.

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.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.009
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.023
Threshold uncertainty score0.078

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.009
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0070.039
Scholarly communication0.0080.018
Open science0.0010.005
Research integrity0.0050.009
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0230.005

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.

Opus teacher head0.104
GPT teacher head0.417
Teacher spread0.313 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2018
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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