How not to research public spheres: A new “dream of a physics of librarianship”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research attention has been focused on the public sphere and librarianship recently, generating disagreement, even controversy. This reflects long-running debates in LIS and related fields. This is not a stale rehash: how we think about the public sphere and libraries is an indicator of libraries in democratic societies and how we position them. A compact account of affinity groupings around this research in LIS will precede an account of the controversy suggesting the question, are there still actually existing public spheres as Habermas deployed the term? The answer clarifies the controversy, and the paper will explore and draw conclusions from it.
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 | 0.045 | 0.060 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.164 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.032 | 0.082 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.023 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.003 |
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".