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Record W3153979947 · doi:10.3366/bjj.2021.0298

So Exact His Text: Reading into the Margins of <i>Sejanus</i>

2021· article· en· W3153979947 on OpenAlexaff
Brock Cameron MacLeod

Bibliographic record

VenueBen Jonson Journal · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicClassical Antiquity Studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Victoria
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMarginaliaLiteratureTragedy (event)HEROCriticismArgument (complex analysis)IdeologyHistoriographyHistoryGreek tragedyTextual criticismPhilosophyArtLawPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Since its 1605 quarto publication, Ben Jonson's Sejanus has inspired much critical commentary. Although criticism credits Jonson with a compositorial role in the Quarto's production, critics continue to assess its marginalia as a defense against application, finding in Sejanus, the play, evidence of parallelography, whether it be ideologically instructional, in the mirror of princes tradition, or threateningly Republican. More benignly, they view the Quarto's bountiful margins as a scholarly pretext, a manifestation and awkward defense of Jonson's unorthodox education. Generically, they view the play as a Juvenalian satire, an imperfect tragedy, or a Machiavellian history and, sometimes, all three. As a satire, it suffers charges of application, of pointing too directly to contemporary events. As a tragedy, it fails to supply the necessary tragic error that leads to the hero's fall, not to mention the necessary hero. As a history, it takes too many liberties with the truth of argument. Editors have pared down the marginalia, setting them as footnotes or endnotes; others have relegated them to appendices; still others have abandoned then entirely. Neither critics nor editors have weighed Jonson's marginalia beside the dramatic text they inform. Reading the Quarto Sejanus as a composite of margins and center, within its bibliographical, theoretical, and literary contexts, shows it to be a learned study in emergent theories of historiography. In its innovations, the composite redresses the inefficacies of contemporary historians and editors.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.009
Threshold uncertainty score0.031

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0080.009
Scholarly communication0.0060.004
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0010.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0090.002

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.

Opus teacher head0.028
GPT teacher head0.316
Teacher spread0.288 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2021
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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