Rethinking the three origin stories for communication studies in North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are three origin stories for communication studies in North America: the Public Speaking tradition in the United States, the Mass Communication tradition in the United States, and the Media Ecology tradition rooted in Canadian scholarship. In this Probe, I want to talk about the three traditions, as I understand them. Then, I want to talk about some experiences surveying residents of rural Lake and Cook counties in Northeastern Minnesota about internet access. Those experiences pushed me to rethink the importance of the third, Canadian tradition of communication studies. This third tradition emphasizes the importance of the materiality of communication, and it is the tradition embraced by media ecology, and I think it asks questions that every communication scholar should think about.
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 | 0.025 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.045 | 0.080 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.031 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".