Howard, Nicole. Loath to Print: The Reluctant Scientific Author, 1500–1750
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When new technologies appear on the scene, there are always zealous early adopters who whole-heartedly embrace innovation.But there are also people who are decidedly more circumspect, who are dubious about change and the trade-offs associated with abandoning a time-tested tool or practice in favour of an untried one.In the Digital Age, people have had to weigh the benefits of rapid communication and expanded access to information against the deficits associated with a loss of privacy and the surge in mis-and disinformation.Though it is increasingly difficult to accomplish, people do "opt out" of aspects of digital culture-choosing landlines over smartphones, broadsheets over tweets, and social gatherings over social media.And while few in the twenty-first century would consider movable-type-printing dangerous and socially disruptive, the Printing Revolution caused a great deal of consternation, even among the most forward-looking scholars of the day.In Loath to Print: The Reluctant Scientific Author, 1500-1750, Nicole Howard explores why and how many eminent astronomers, mathematicians, and natural philosophers-thinkers who relied on intellectual exchange and invited critiques of their work-either eschewed print or developed strategies to mitigate the perceived perils associated with mechanical reproduction.Absorbing and astute, Howard's book expands upon and complicates preceding studies focused on the history of print (including her own The Book: The Life Story of a Technology [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005]) and the history of science, demonstrating not only how the broader "world of print was messy and complex" but also how it was especially problematic for scientific authors whose reputations, livelihoods, and, potentially, even their lives depended upon not being misattributed or misapprehended (6).Howard argues that while print promised the promulgation of new ideas, for some scientists, that promise came with an attendant fear of losing control of one's intellectual property, which could only be assuaged once authors "found alternative ways to bend print to meet their needs, " strategies that also included bending readers' access to and perceptions of what they read (175).The introduction to Loath to Print declares that the "book is as much a history of communication in the early modern scientific community as it
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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.004 |
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".