The Bible as Technology: How the Catholic Communication Infrastructure Creates a Path Dependency
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Situating the Roman Catholic Church within studies of communication infrastructures, my thesis demonstrates how the Church's communication practices were established and entrenched the Church in a path dependency.I situate the Vatican's canonical interpretation of the Bible as technology and examine failures in the Church's infrastructure, which makes elements of the system visible.I study two historical events related to the papacy that highlight these failures: the fourteenth-century Western Schism and Pope Francis' 2020 gay marriage controversy.I explain how Catholic interpretation of the Bible, as an infrastructural technology, is used to resolve Church conflict, but introduces contradictions.I employ a cultural approach, which places religion as the product of media practices and recognizes Catholic interpretation of the Bible as an integral part of infrastructure situated within its complex cultural interactions.Coining the term doppel-paths, I explore path dependency alongside soft technological determinism, and, through this intervention, I provide a novel theoretical approach to understanding religious infrastructures and their contradictions.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".