Review of Henning Schmidgen, Bruno Latour in Pieces: An Intellectual Biography . Translated by Gloria Custance. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. xvi + 175 pages
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bruno Latour in Pieces (BLP) offers a brief but extensive introduction to Latour’s education, career, collaborations, and collaborators. BLP is Latourean in its insistence on pointing to the “ego, hic, nunc”. By following Latour’s method of indexing, of pointing to people, places, and times, Schmidgen aptly follows Latour. Like any biography worth its salt, Schmidgen’s research follows the influences that played a role in transforming Latour into the thinker he is, but also plays it close to the ear by not only articulating the bibliographical information, but in attempting a genealogy of Latourian philosophy. Schmidgen reveals the sources of a rearticulation of many key Science and Technology Studies themes in relationships developed in biblical hermeneutics through his ethnography of the Guillemin’s Laboratory. BLP is after all an “intellectual biography,” so it is hardly surprising that Schmidgen attempts what his project plainly sets out to do. But, what is pleasantly surprising is the interconnected mosaic generated in graphing historical bibliographical details onto Latour’s intellectual development. The imagine of Latourian studies is circulated, and in turn transformed (there is no circulation, no translation, without transformation), but what is up for debate is whether these transformations are felicitous in maintaining the relationships that make them possible.
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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.013 |
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".