Bibliographic record
Abstract
This sociological collection advances the argument that the concepts of “biography” and "turning point" expand our understanding of life experiences from a descriptive to a deeper, more abstract level of analysis. Theoretically, the collection addresses the manifold ways that we might refine the concept of “turning point” since Anselm Strauss introduced the notion in his 1959 book, Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity. The book addresses the conceptual issue of what distinguishes turning points from ages, stages, and life transitions in general and raises crucial questions about the application of turning points as a biographical research method and advances a dialogue with concepts offered by theorists from Andrew Abbott to Max Weber. Biography and turning points in Europe and America distinctive and significant due to its broad empirical database. It includes scholars’ work from nine different countries (Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Russia, the United States and Venezuela), providing a number of contexts (from repudiating gang violence in Venezuela to constructing family narratives in lesbian lives in Britain) for thinking about how turning points relate to biography in an era following the narrative turn. The contributors articulate increasingly globalized concerns in the Western world regarding the identities and simultaneously structuration forces of gender, race-ethnicity, class, sexuality, migration, detention and religion – while they remain, nevertheless, grounded in the unique nations and communities included here. This enables sensitivity to variable constructs of significance that are associated with turning points—from bifurcation and biography to narrative and discursive analysis. In sum, this collection aims to advance a dialogue on turning points in the context of new developments in theory and method.
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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.668 | 0.560 |
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".