Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay is inspired by what has become a staple of cultural studies, the parsing of keywords that appear and crystallize during moments of social, cultural, political and economic change. It takes as its starting point a methodology based in the examples of Williams’ (1985) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society and Grover’s (1987) “AIDS: Keywords” in order to trace the ways that the language of COVID-19 has served simultaneously to make intelligible and obscure, reveal and cover over the divisions, contradictions and inequalities of the pandemic experience. Rather than attempting a dictionary-style entry system of keywords, which would imply a stability of meaning that might be excavated and understood, this essay animates certain keywords of the pandemic, which are bolded below, in order to situate, define and critique them. It looks to particular keywords tied to pandemic subjectification and the divisions these elicit and elide, such as the asymptomatic carrier, essential worker, self-isolation/inverted quarantine and vulnerable populations, as heuristics for a kind of conjunctural analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 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".