<scp>Melvyn New</scp> and <scp>Anthony W Lee</scp> (eds). <i>Notes on Footnotes: Annotating Eighteenth-Century Literature</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Really, universally, annotations stop nowhere, as Henry James almost said. Or at least, that can be the danger for even the most rigorous scholarly editor: of drowning text in redundant paratext, submerging creativity in otiose commentary, pulverizing Golden-Age verse with Saturnian Lead. There is always more to say, and there is always a case to be made for saying it. Among the dedicatees of Notes on Footnotes is the irrepressible universal scholar Pierre Bayle, ‘who taught us’, Melvyn New and Anthony W. Lee write, ‘that no informative annotation can be too lengthy’. Bayle’s virtuosity as an annotator—his baroque, cornucopian, sometimes magnificently scurrilous footnotes, to say nothing of his wraparound marginal glosses, or his ludic, recursive notes on the notes—made him the hero of Anthony Grafton’s The Footnote: A Curious History (1997). But Bayle’s prolixity also placed him, and more particularly the scholarly editors who annotated in his wake, right in the satirical crosshairs of Pope’s Dunciad Variorum. Pope’s eloquent mise en page enacts his sense of cultural decay and the mediocrity of the modern. A churning groundswell of ironic, bogus, or otherwise wrongheaded annotation pushes the verse it should illuminate to the uppermost lines of the printed page (sometimes no more than a couplet appears), like an action hero gasping for breath as the ship sinks and the waters rise.
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 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.161 | 0.095 |
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".