Bibliographic record
Abstract
This short Commentary imagines law and humanities not as a “canon” per se, but as a “field without a canon”; or a canon that resists canonization. Arts-based practices utilized in legal research and teaching expose the law and humanities “canon” to its dual (and somewhat contradictory) nature: ever straining toward a preestablished archive, it must also leap ahead fearlessly to properly defy disciplinary boundaries and move the field beyond siloed thinking, which is one of the preliminary aims of law and humanities scholarship and pedagogy. Arts-based practices consist not of a stable collection of set texts but instead signify a process of experimentation that is ever in flux and alive to possibility. It is this process of discovering new arts-based practices that ensures law and humanities remains a vibrant, yet ever-changing, field for years to come. To that end, this Commentary surveys a sampling of outsider approaches to law and humanities scholarship and pedagogy, those more concerned with process than product, and which are coming from outside of or beyond the more traditionally conceived canon of law and humanities. These approaches fall into two broad categories: (1) arts-based scholarly legal practices and (2) arts-based legal pedagogical practices. A uniting feature of both these approaches is that they are being undertaken and explored by Canadian legal scholars at a small law school on Vancouver Island on the West Coast of Canada, namely the University of Victoria Faculty of Law, where there is an impressive number of faculty members using arts-based practices in their research and teaching.
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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".