Positioning Paradata: A Conceptual Frame for AI Processual Documentation in Archives and Recordkeeping Contexts
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The emergence of sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools poses a challenge to archives and records professionals, who are accustomed to understanding and documenting the activities of human agents rather than the often-opaque processes of sophisticated AI functioning. Preliminary work has proposed the term paradata to describe the unique documentation needs that emerge for archivists using AI tools to process records in their collections. For the purposes of archivists working with AI, paradata is conceptualized here as information recorded and preserved about records’ processing with AI tools; it is a category of data that is defined both by its relationship with other datasets and by the documentary purpose it serves. This article surveys relevant literature across three contexts to scope the relevant scholarship that archivists may draw upon to develop appropriate AI documentation practices. From the statistical social sciences and the visual heritage fields, the article discusses existing definitions of paradata and its ambiguous, often contextually dependent relationship with existing metadata categories. Approaching the problem from a sociotechnical perspective, literature on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) insists pointedly that explainability be attuned to specific users’ stated needs—needs that archivists may better articulate using the framework of paradata. Most importantly, the article situates AI as a challenge to accountability, transparency, and impartiality in archives by introducing an unfamiliar non-human agency, one that pushes the limits of existing archival practice and demands the development of new concepts and vocabularies to shape future technological and methodological developments in archives.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it