Sacred Cyberspaces: Catholicism, New Media, and the Religious Experience, By Oren Golan and Michele MartiniMediating Catholicism: Religion and Media in Global Catholic Imaginaries, Edited by Eric Hoenes del Pinal, Marc Roscoe Loustau, and Kristin Norget
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The phrase “religion and media” describes a field that studies the intersection of two purportedly distinct spheres. This grammatical construction emphasizes religion and media as separate entities, with many studies framed in terms of the effects of one upon the other. The underlying framework in some of the chapters of both books reviewed here is that there is something Catholic (ideas, practices, and communities), and it is expressed, manifested, or otherwise mediated through digital, legacy, or material media. Sacred Cyberspaces: Catholicism, New Media, and the Religious Experience, by Oren Golan and Michele Martini, emphasizes the shininess of digital media, claiming that “much of what we know about faith and the internet would suggest a lack of cohesion between the two” (40). Golan and Martini thus contrast “age-old traditions” with the “young, dynamic, ephemeral, shifting, and occasionally frivolous elements” of new media (40). The collection of chapters comprising Mediating Catholicism: Religion and Media in Global Catholic takes a more critical approach, elucidating a variety of moments where ideas of Catholicism and media are co-constituted differently in different places around the globe. Although both books point to a growing scholarly interest in religion and theories of mediation, Sacred Cyberspaces approaches Catholicism (and religion more broadly) as a stable entity, whereas Mediating Catholicism contains chapters that instead explore the continuous construction of Catholicism through communicative processes.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 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".