Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter considers the possibility that some performance records may refer to situations in which one of the two usual foundations of drama—text and action—appears to be lacking. I do not mean merely that records of the text or action have not survived, but that one of these elements was not a part of the original performance. There is an inherent difficulty in discussing such a possibility, since in many cases it requires the analysis not of what is contained in the documents, but of what is missing. Argumentum ex silentio is always a problematic proposition, and I will constantly emphasise the thin ice on which I am treading. We must be constantly aware that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’, as well as understanding that proving a negative is notoriously difficult if not, as some logicians would have it, impossible. My purpose here, though, is not to prove the existence of drama without text or action, but to put forward the possibility that this may be the most likely explanation of some situations that seem otherwise puzzling or inexplicable. It is hardly surprising that the thin evidence on which this discussion is based leads inevitably to a post-positive viewpoint of these texts, by which it is understood that a comprehensive view of the past is simply not possible. Such a viewpoint is articulated more fully by Claire Sponsler in her essay in this volume. A brief survey of ‘drama’ as it appears in standard dictionaries and descriptive sources brings to light several assumptions about the nature of the genre. Two expectations predominate: drama is ‘a composition in prose or verse’, a phrase often expanded to ‘a literary composition’. Second, it is ‘adapted to be acted upon a stage’ or ‘intended to be acted upon the stage’. These expectations do not, of course, always apply to the reality of performance, whether in the Middle Ages or the twenty-first century. Examining their implications somewhat more closely, it is clear that the most significant result of categorising drama as a ‘composition’ or ‘literary composition’ is the assumption that it is centred on a text; since that text is both ‘composed’ and ‘literary’, the suggestion seems strong that it pre-exists performance.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 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".