World of One’s Own: The Imaginative Geographies of Opicinus de Canastris
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay introduces to a wider audience a manuscript filled with drawings of the Medterranean world that were produced by the papal scribe Opicinus de Canastris between 1337 and 1341 (Vat. lat. 6435). While early literature on Opicinus often foregrounded his eccentricity either to devalue his drawings on aesthetic grounds or to use the drawings as a testiment to his anachronistically perceived psychotic state, he has recently received renewed attention for his engagement with medieval developments in science and technology. Such studies highlight the formal similarities shared with contemporary maps, mystical imagery, and scientific diagrams. Putting aside attempts to decisively argue what the images were meant to be, I use a unique drawing within the manuscript that layers two different maps on top of one another to show how the image embraces its hybrid form in reimagining what the world might look like.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".