The Mediation is the Message: Charles Johnstone’s <i>Chrysal</i> (1760)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Because Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal, or The Adventures of a Guinea (1760) is a novel of circulation about the travels of a coin, it is self-evidently about how value is constructed. Mediation thus becomes not merely a background process in the novel but the fundamental way in which value is generated for the economy, the nation, and printed texts. The mediation inherent in commerce, in the idea of the nation, and in the medium of print caused significant anxieties for eighteenth-century Britons. If pervasive mediation transformed what it touched, how could value be stable? Chrysal answers this question by showing that mediation always produces the proper value. Economic transactions eventually lead to the right outcome, regardless of participants’ motives; the British nation is produced by mediation between ruler and people; and good books are created in the process of transforming a text from manuscript to print. Chrysal argues that the novel’s own mediated status should guarantee its worth and that mediation itself, rather than fixity, should become the accepted means to value.
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 teacher head, 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".