The McLuhan-Innis Field: In Search of Media Theory
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background This article uses archival material to revisit the intellectual and professional relationship between Harold A. Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Analysis The author suggests four concepts by which to approach questions of influence, collaboration, legacy, and the emergence of intellectual “fields.” Each offers a different view than an analogous term more frequently employed in narratives of intellectual history and legacy. These concepts are oscillation (over influence), fragment (over narrative), discovery (over provenance), and maintenance (over innovation). Conclusion and implications The author shows how these concepts encourage generative approaches to theory-making more in line with the ethos of early media theory. They move considerations of intellectual history beyond assumptions about individual genius, nationalism, or institutional context, bringing to the fore intellectual contributions of marginalized figures such as Mary Quayle Innis (Harold’s wife) and Margaret Stewart (McLuhan’s secretary).
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it