Images of the arXiv: Reconfiguring large scientific image datasets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In an ongoing research project on the ascendancy of statistical visual forms, we have been concerned with the transformations wrought by such images and their organisation as datasets in ‘re-drawing’ knowledge about empirical phenomena. Historians and science studies researchers have long established the generative rather than simply illustrative role of images and figures within scientific practice. More recently, the deployment and generation of images by scientific research and its communication via publication has been impacted by the tools, techniques, and practices of working with large (image) datasets. Against this background, we built a dataset of 10 million-plus images drawn from all preprint articles deposited in the open access repository arXiv from 1991 (its inception) until the end of 2018. In this article, we suggest ways – including algorithms drawn from machine learning that facilitate visually ’slicing’ through the image data and metadata – for exploring large datasets of statistical scientific images. By treating all forms of visual material found in scientific publications – whether diagrams, photographs, or instrument data – as bare images, we developed methods for tracking their movements across a range of scientific research. We suggest that such methods allow us different entry points into large scientific image datasets and that they initiate a new set of questions about how scientific representation might be operating at more-than-human scale.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".