The Science of Seeing Science: Examining the Visuality Hypothesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Fundamental disciplinary differences may be traceable to the use of visual representations, with researchers in the physical and life sciences relying more heavily on visuality. Our goal was to examine how inscriptions are used by scientists in different disciplines. We analyzed 2,467 articles from journals in biology, criminology and criminal justice, gerontology, library and information science, medicine, psychology, and sociology. Proportion of page space dedicated to graphs, tables, and non-graph illustrations was calculated. A Visuality Index was defined as the proportion of page space dedicated to visual depictions of data and non-data information. An ANOVA indicated a statistically significant difference between disciplines, interaction between inscription type and discipline, with articles published in biology journals dedicating more page space to graphs. The significant overlap in inscription use and visuality indicates imperfect disciplinary demarcation, suggesting similar methodological and data analytic practices within a discipline and between subdisciplines.
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 | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".