Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lost Books and Printing in London, 1557–1640: An Analysis of the Stationers’ Company Register. By ALexandra HIll. (Library of the Written Word, 68; The Handpress World, 52.) Leiden and Boston: Brill. 2018. ix + 224 pp. + 7 pp. colour plates. €130. isbn 978 90 04 34919 3 (hardback); 978 90 04 34920 9 (e-book). I feel obliged to begin this essay by offering an apology to Alexandra Hill for having made her book something of a scapegoat, using it to illustrate several common beliefs and attitudes that I think need to be openly discussed and criticized. Lost Books is by no means either the only or the most egregious example of these fallacies and problems, none of which the author originated and at least one of which was probably imposed by a supervisor of the student project as which the study began. What Dr Hill sets out to do is to survey early modern print culture within her chosen date-range, focusing on a selection of different kinds of printed material in an attempt to show both how and why a proper understanding of the period needs to include a consideration of books, pamphlets, and broadsheets that no longer survive, and not just examples that still exist to be studied. Her attempt to do so is based on an extensive study of the titles entered during those years in the Stationers’ Register. As a method, of course, this is not entirely new: many influential surveys of the pre-Restoration drama and most studies of early modern ballads have necessarily mined the Registers before now, and those ledgers have not been ignored by the pioneers in the field of popular (and especially cheap popular) pamphlet literature. But Hill's attempt at a broader and more comprehensive survey has certainly covered some new ground and should not be ignored.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.044 | 0.011 |
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".