Regulating Visibility: Secrecy and Surveillance in Insular Religious Communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Insular religious communities offer significant insights into some of the issues facing contemporary Western societies, including the issues of religious secrecy and surveillance. The role of secrecy in these communities involves dynamic strategies invoked for many reasons in equally numerous contexts. The behaviours and practices of these groups often reflect much larger issues present in today’s society. In this way, they can guide us in understanding the role of surveillance from a sociological perspective in the current climate of tensions and anxieties. These communities are especially useful for thinking about questions of why some religious groups rigidly control and restrict access to bodies of secret, sacred knowledge or activities and in turn how religious secrecy is viewed by the wider social worlds in which their degree of visibility fluctuates. Here, I suggest an opportunity emerges for the study of secrecy in relation to the notion of regulating visibility by reorienting the focus from the roles of secrets and of secretive practices to one that also considers the more visible forms and strategies through which secrets and secretive practices come to be and are sustained.
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 | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".