Bibliographic record
Abstract
Does craft correlate to care? To quality? What is the relationship between time and craft, and is the speed of culture openly antagonistic to its values? To speak meaningfully about craft in the twenty-first century, we must have a clear and shared set of terminologies defined relationally. If we examine craft positioned alongside other concepts such as art, skill, tradition, material, process, and community, then we can establish a plural and generative framework highly relevant to complex creative practices today. I am most interested in focusing on digital craft as a central meeting place for creative practice and the pervasive technological mediation of our lives. This study aims to establish a foundational vocabulary that allows us to investigate the intersection of craft with digital media. Theorists across both fields—and some who have sought to bridge this divide—have proposed various organizing principles to better make sense of the apparent contradictions between technologically mediated and more traditional material practices. Still, we have not yet arrived at a critical mass recognizing digital craft as legible and necessary rather than a peripheral novelty. This study examines the relationships between ‘craft’ and ‘the digital’ as demonstrated through the prominent theories of influential scholars and analysis of leading practitioners. A greater consideration of craft within digital media studies will draw out persistent discrepancies between skilled production and directorial agency while a greater consideration of the digital within craft theory will challenge historical ideas of tactility and presence and further clarify the function of craft as body knowledge. This study will be qualitative in nature as I attempt to understand how craft has been theorized and what motivating factors and key variables have produced these interpretations. It will identify key issues at hand while using an exploratory research design to conduct a survey of key texts within craft theory and digital media studies to explore these ideas in context. Existing theorization provides the basis of this investigation as I seek to increase our shared language around digital craft and establish possibilities for future research within the field. To pose a question such as “what is craft?” seems fraught with the impossibility of resolution, since the very term itself speaks to plurality rather than singular essence, given the diversity of potential interpretive models. Instead, I propose exploring craft through a relational framework, arriving not at fixed definitions but instead articulating ways of thinking with craft particular to the context at hand. Ideas of ‘craft’ and ‘the digital’ are mutually transforming each other. We do not yet have an adequate vocabulary to understand the relationship between craft and digital media due, in part, to the many meanings these terms communicate. How have researchers and practitioners previously understood their intersection? To better articulate what we say when we say ‘craft’ we must reassess the relationship of skill, tradition, experimentation, and process to the field as well as to digital media practices.
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 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.093 | 0.015 |
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".