Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spiritualism is generally concerned with the belief that spirits of the dead can communicate with the living. It also specifically refers to a religion that began in the late 1840s in North America and that centers on the same premise, that of spirit communication, albeit communication facilitated by mediums (seemediumship) in addition to other guiding principles. These principles, which set the founding philosophy of spiritualists, include, among others, the belief that there is life after death (the continuous existence of the human soul), a belief in our own personal responsibility, and a belief in God. In the beginning of the twenty‐first century spiritualist churches could be found throughout the United Kingdom (about 350 churches), United States (about 100 churches at a conservative estimate), Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Although the religion began in the 1840s following the establishment of intelligent communication with a spirit entity through rappings (i.e., knocking sounds of no apparent natural origin), there are particular figures that feature earlier in the history of spiritualism due to similar beliefs in, and searching for, proof of an afterlife. Such figures include Emanuel Swedenborg, an eighteenth‐century Swedish scientist, theologian, and astronomer, who famously made a transition from scientist to mystic as a result of his widely reported visions, spiritual insights, and messages from the spirit world. Franz Mesmer is also considered an important precursor since the development of his trance‐inducing technique, Mesmerism, often caused participants to describe contact with otherworldly beings (seehypnotism). Swedenborg's name appears again in the history of spiritualism due to a young American medium by the name of Andrew Jackson Davis who allegedly made contact with him through trance. Davis combined the tenets of Swedenborg and Mesmer by receiving many spirit messages from the former and practicing and lecturing extensively about the latter. It is possible Edgar Allan Poe (seepoe, edgar allan) was inspired by Davis in writing “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” since it is documented that he attended many of Davis' lectures on mesmerism (Sova 2001: 85).
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.061 | 0.019 |
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".