Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines patents as typified communicative practices enacted within the articulated and rigid boundaries of legal systems. By applying concepts from rhetorical genre studies, the article identifies the regularities of textual features and social intentions characterizing the patent genre and shows how patents are compulsorily constructed, evaluated, and contested within highly structured socio-cultural contexts. Despite their conservative nature, both patents and the rules surrounding them are the outcome of continuous negotiations of meanings and motives among those participating in them (e.g., inventors, patent examiners, and legislators) and depend on this participation. Through a genre analysis of the system of patents granted to the University of Toronto in the 1920s for its method for producing insulin and the medical substance itself, the article discusses the changes that Toronto’s Insulin Committee was able to make to the patent genre and to a broader system of interrelated genres. This case study confirms that genre innovation and transformation are indeed possible, even in the most formal and stable environments. It also demonstrates that in order to appreciate the strategic goals and rhetorical actions performed by genres, we have to situate them within the specific socio-historical circumstances in which they were enacted. RÉSUMÉCet article étudie les brevets comme méthode de communication caractérisée ayant lieu à l’intérieur des limites structurées et rigides de systèmes juridiques. En appliquant les concepts issus de la théorie littéraire des genres, cet article identifie les constantes des caractéristiques textuelles et des intentions sociales qui caractérisent le genre du brevet et montre comment les brevets sont obligatoirement élaborés, évalués et contestés dans des contextes socio-culturels hautement structurés. Malgré leur nature conservatrice, tant les brevets que les règles qui les entourent sont le fruit de constantes négociations de signification et d’intentions entre ceux qui y participent (par ex. les inventeurs, les examinateurs de brevets et les législateurs) et dépendent de cette participation. Par l’analyse du genre du système de brevets émis à l’Université de Toronto dans les années 1920 pour sa méthode de production d’insuline et pour cette substance médicale elle-même, cet article aborde les changements que le Toronto’s Insulin Committee a pu apporter aux brevets comme genre et à un système plus large de genres interreliés. Cette étude de cas confirme que l’innovation de genre et la transformation sont en effet possibles, même dans les environnements les plus stables et les plus formels. Elle démontre également que, afin d’apprécier les objectifs stratégiques et les actions rhétoriques posées par les genres, nous devons les replacer dans le contexte socio-historique spécifique au sein duquel ils ont pris forme.
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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 | 0.017 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.082 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".