A Digital Voice from the Dust: The Joseph Smith Papers at the Intersection of Public and Digital History <sup>1</sup>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Like other documentary editing projects, the Joseph Smith Papers—an effort to produce a comprehensive edition of the papers of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as Mormons—seeks to provide reliable access to “the authentic voice” of its eponymous historical figure in innovative ways. As a digital voice from the dust, the project makes Smith's words, character, and context accessible in the online representation of his papers in ways that forcefully illustrate the convergence of public and digital history. This article uses the Joseph Smith Papers Project (JSPP) as a case study to look at documentary collections at the intersection of digital and public history while exploring issues of scholarship, access, and transparency. The trends described here promise to have implications for the larger fields of digitally presented public history and documentary collections.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.027 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".