Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter introduces the concept of data threads, used them to follow the material and discursive construction of infant mortality data in Toronto, and explores theoretical positions that underlie them. It illustrates the data threads approach through a story of infant mortality statistics. The chapter compares data threads to data journeys in terms of materiality and spatiality. As data are translated and put to work in various settings, the chapter suggests that Star and Lampland risk becoming further disentangled from the phenomena they are intended to represent. It concludes by reflecting briefly on the ethical and political work that data threads perform in revealing the invisibilities of infrastructure. Data threads promise a way to draw attention to the bracketing-off of the materiality and material practices that bring about data, as well as the discursive and ideological regimes that allow them to take form.
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 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 | 0.010 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.029 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.036 | 0.010 |
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".