Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Writing in Public: Literature and the Liberty of the Press (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), I describe how the public function of literature changed as a result of developing press freedoms during the period from 1760 to 1810. I examine contests over the laws of copyright, defamation, privacy, and seditious libel to show what happened to literary writing once certain forms of discourse came to be perceived as public and entitled to freedom from state or private control. This issue of Critical Analysis of Law offers reviews of my book by Brian Cowan, Leslie Kendrick, Karen Petroski, and Elliott Visconsi. In this brief article, I address some of the reservations these reviewers express about my argument in the book, and in particular about its approach and tone. I note my own similar concerns, and I elaborate on what I see as some of the repercussions for my argument of having to limit its scope. I also restate my findings more forcefully to make clear that the position I take on the history I relate is not quite any of the several divergent positions that the reviewers attribute to me. My aim in the book, I emphasize, is to describe the consequences of a kind of cultural trade-off between literature and the law, among other discourses, that occurred in the transition to democracy, but I refrain from taking a position on these consequences.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.030 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.045 | 0.057 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.004 |
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".