“Shitty Graphs”: Data Intimacy and the Feeling of Numbers in Type 1 Diabetes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Diabetes is a self-quantified chronic disease, where measuring blood sugars is the very grounds for understanding and surviving the condition. This article analyzes how people with type 1 diabetes who use continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) share their CGM data visualizations on social media platforms and develop data intimacies with other diabetics around the visual vernaculars of CGM graphs: the “flat line” ideal and the “shitty graph.” CGM graphs mediate relationships between people with type 1 diabetes and how they feel their numbers. Based on a review of posts on r/diabetes_t1 over a period of nine months (August 2022–April 2023), the authors identified and analyzed two recurring visual vernaculars in screenshots of CGM graphs and the talk that occurred around them. As “domains of affective practice,” these subreddit posts and talk around screenshots of CGM graphs mediate the “bad feelings” of diabetes and materialize the charged platform data intimacies between diabetics.
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 | 0.007 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".