Tongue-Tied by Authorities: Library of Congress Vocabularies and the Shakespeare Authorship Question
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the existence of a vast literature reflecting hundreds of years of scholarship questioning the authorship of the works of Shakespere, the conventional Library of Congress Name Authority File and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are unable to accurately describe this literature owing to their assumption that the author was William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon. Adopting a pragmatic, philosophically realist perspective based in social epistemology, this article highlights past and current deficiencies in the authority records concerning Shakespere and proposes changes that would better reflect the nature and purpose of this literature, as well as the historic signifiers of the named persons in question.
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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 | 0.021 | 0.083 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.029 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".