Viscous Objects. The Uneven Resistances of Repair
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The MV Veteran, a seagoing car ferry constructed by the Dutch industrial conglomerate Damen Shipyards Group, connects the two small, rural outport communities of Fogo Island and Change Islands to the larger island of Newfoundland, Canada. Our paper examines the breakdowns of this new ferry and the repairs facilitated through its manufacturer’s warranty. In our analysis, we treat the warranty as a ‘script’ as something that both constrains and enables action and engenders resistances. The warranty anticipates and conditions both future times and spacings of breakdown and how those future breakdowns are to be addressed through activities such as maintenance and repair. In recounting the ferry’s breakdowns and repairs, we explore how the case of this ferry and its warranty in this particular place suggests a need to add to the analytical and conceptual repertoire for thinking about the breakdown and repair of technical objects. We suggest there is a need for supple enough concepts of breakdown and repair that they can deal with technical objects that are neither as ‘fluid’ as the classic example of a bush-pump nor quite as ‘fixed’ as infrastructures embedded in landscapes such as electrical grids or canals. Thus, we think with the notion of the ‘viscosity’ of technical objects. We claim that the importance of the term viscosity in the sociotechnical lexicon is not to demark a halfway point between fluid and fixed, mobile and immobile, but to point out how a single object like a ferry can be all of these things, unevenly, at once through characterizing its multiple resistances following breakdowns.
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 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".