An ethnography of deletion: Materializing transience in Solomon Islands digital cultures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article demonstrates the fragility of digital storage through a non-media-centric ethnography of data management practices in the so-called Global South. It shows how in the Lau Lagoon, Malaita Province, Solomon Islands, the capacity to reliably store digital media is curtailed by limited access to means of capital production and civic infrastructures, as well as a comparatively isolated tropical ecology that bedevils the permanence of all things. The object biography of mobile phones, including MicroSD cards, typically short, fits into a broader historical pattern of everyday engagements with materializations of transience in the Lau Lagoon. Three types of visual media are exemplary in this regard: sand, ancestral material cultures and digital visual media (photographs and videos). Ultimately, Lau experiences of transience in their visual media are located in their visual technological history and the choices they make about which materials to maintain or dispose of.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".