Disability and cycling technology: A socio-historical analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores longstanding links between cycling and disability. Social models of disability and closely related theories on the social construction of technology are central to our approach. The former insists that disability is a social construct; the latter views technology as socially formed. Disabled persons engage in cycling for, among other things, the pleasure of moving about the city and countryside, parks and neighbourhoods, to access places of work and study, and to gain greater independence in their daily lives. They have played an active role in the development and adaptation of cycles to make them better suited to particular needs. Disabled persons, their friends and family, and technicians have shared ideas and information to design cycling machines that reduce the limitations of technologies and environments developed for so-called "able" bodies. Here, we present a typology identifying seven types of cycles that were and are used by disabled persons for varying purposes. They are as follows: transporters, pedomotives, manumotives, sociables, stability machines, tandems, and power-assisted bikes. In each case, examples existed in the nineteenth century or earlier but social construction and improved materials and technology have dramatically enhanced their utility in recent years.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".