The Blair Martyr Project: The <i>Passion of Perpetua</i> and Found Footage Horror
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholarly conversations about the Passion of Perpetua have often centred not only on the historicity of the events described, but also on the authenticity of its claim that certain sections were written by the hand of Perpetua herself in her personal diary or journal. This has led some scholars to seek to adjudicate which sections of the account should be considered “authentic” and which are the work of a later editor(s). I propose instead to read the Passion of Perpetua through the lens of found footage, a sub-genre of horror films popularized by the release of the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project. While found footage as a genre is obviously a modern invention for a different medium, it nonetheless offers a helpful heuristic for understanding the function of the Passion of Perpetua. While the author(s) of this ancient text was certainly unaware of modern movie-making conventions, the text nonetheless bears striking and important affinities with found footage horror both in its conceits and its intended effect.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".