Bibliographic record
Abstract
In one of the more recent, and perhaps the most personally revelatory, of his long list of books published over the past forty-some years, John Witte, Jr. recalls that as a child and adolescent growing up in Canada, he played a lot of soccer.1 Or, at least, he played enough to be sufficiently skillful as a center halfback to be in the thick of things much of the time.Playing offense as well as defense, he had opportunities to score but also to steal the ball from opponents.What gave him as much pleasure as anything, he remembers, was the joy of passing the ball at just the right moment to enable a teammate to score.This assist counted almost as much as if John had scored the goal himself.Toting up stats at the end of the season, he took great pride in the number of his assists.Comparing this sporting activity to his professional life, John reflected in this recent essay that he still finds satisfaction as a kind of intellectual center halfback.In his work as a teacher, scholar, and director of an influential academic center, joy often comes in passing the ball-in this case, suggesting a dissertation topic for a student, inviting a colleague for a visiting lectureship, or collaborating on a book.All of these initiatives involve fellow scholarsteammates-in probing the relationship of law and religion.This game has been going on much longer than regulation-some forty years-and by now the score has been run-up to ridiculous numbers.And along the way, John Witte has made more assists than statisticians can adequately tabulate.The playing field for much of this fun has been Emory University, where John served from 1987 to 2022 as director of what is now called the Center for the Study of Law and Religion (CSLR).In 2022, he stepped away from day-today administration of the center and appointed a new executive director while 1 John Witte, Jr., "Assists and the Legal Profession," in id., Table Talk: Short Talks on the Weightier Matters of Law and Religion (
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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 | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.031 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.054 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.082 | 0.044 |
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".