Bedtime Stories: Audiobooks, Podcasts, and Reading as Listening (and Sleeping)
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
This essay approaches sleep podcasts as bedtime stories, exploring the contradictory phenomenology of reading and listening while falling asleep. The first part categorizes audiobook and podcast listening as aural reading through an expanded definition of aurality and a logic of mediated self-control. The essay then proposes a concept of so(m)niferous reading to describe the paradoxical audio-textual inattentiveness that mediates the experience of going to sleep in a typical sleep podcast like Drew Ackerman’s Sleep With Me (2013). Finally, the essay contextualizes the so(m)niferous reading of audiobooks/podcasts in the discourse of children’s bedtime stories, raising critical questions about the subjectivity and agency of so(m)mniferous readers in the contemporary sleepscape .
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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