The Many-Sided Franklin Ford and the History of a Post-Discipline
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Building on recent works emphasizing the “post-disciplinary” status of communication research, this article explores the implications of this thesis for the history of communication studies. While a portion of the existing historiography fits the disciplinary framework, the post-disciplinary thesis raises theoretical, methodological, and empirical challenges. In order to meet those challenges, we argue that historical research should also be directed toward intellectual and institutional projects that predated or transcended the institutionalization of communication as a discipline. To this end, we revisit the contribution of American journalist Franklin Ford (1849–1918) as an entry point into a historical moment when the study of communication was considered intellectually, socially, and institutionally relevant—for reasons that differ from the post-World War II institutionalization of communication as a discipline. Based on archival research, our approach emphasizes how Ford’s project diverges from the conventional disciplinary histories.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".