<scp>Nicholas Cronk, Nick Treuherz, Nicolas Fréry, Ruggero Sciuto, Antony McKenna</scp>, and <scp>Gianluca Mori</scp> (eds). <i>Lettres sur les Anglais</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Poised teasingly between French and English, its textual genesis blurred and disputed, Voltaire’s Lettres sur les Anglais (a.k.a. Lettres philosophiques, a.k.a. Letters Concerning the English Nation) is as tough to pin down editorially as anything on the bilingual spectrum from Beckford to Beckett. Perhaps more so. The literary power and historical importance of Voltaire’s early masterpiece have been unquestioned since the early 1900s, when its first scholarly editor, Gustave Lanson, declared it ‘la première bombe lancée contre l’ancien régime’. Among the proto-revolutionary credentials of the book (Lanson had little time for its ironies or contradictions) were its strenuous defence of freedom of conscience; its trenchant attacks on religious persecution and political censorship; its celebration of mixed government, limited monarchy, and commercial freedom; and its promotion of empirical thought and enlightenment values, as typified by Lockean philosophy, Baconian or Newtonian science, and (in the remarkable eleventh letter) Lady Mary Wortley Montagu on inoculation.
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 | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.220 | 0.141 |
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".