It has touched us all: Commentary on the social implications of touch during the COVID-19 pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper considers the political implications of the COVID-19 pandemic through a focus on the sense of touch. It begins by briefly outlining current sociological and philosophical theories of touch as an empathetic, pervasive, and social sense. Taking lead from news media, it then suggests how touch and virus-enforced touchlessness intersects with issues of race, class, gender, ableism, and technology. Action taken by governing bodies in the face of the pandemic, such as the introduction of lockdowns and the emphasis on working from home, signals and protects privilege while exacerbating oppression for the marginalised and Othered. The ability to both deny touch and simultaneously flaunt advice surrounding distancing clarifies a point of departure that separates the lower classes and the racialised, the non-male and the less abled, from the male and able-bodied, the white and wealthy.
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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 | 0.016 | 0.063 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.065 | 0.075 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
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".