Chapter 22. Seymour de Ricci and William Roberts: Recorders and Analysts of the Market
Bibliographic record
Abstract
the Late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a golden age for the freelance chroniclers and analysts of the European art world.There was even a living to be had from writing for the journals, reviews, magazines, and newspapers that then proliferated. 1 The two men who are the subject of the present chapter were particularly successful in making their mark in this world, but they may be said to represent merely the apex of a much larger realm of art critics, reviewers and historians.They owed their success to their ability to write in an informed way on a range of topics: each must have written more than one article every week, and each was able to offer a range of pertinent facts to back up his judgment.Seymour de Ricci had formidable talents that ranged widely and, when he chose, he went deeply into a variety of cultural fields: bibliography, especially historical, epigraphy, numismatics, art history (of almost all periods) and more. 2 Today he is best known for his Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, published in three awkwardly sized volumes between 1935 and 1940.It does not quite meet all the standards set by later catalogues of medieval manuscripts such as those by the late Neil Ker, but for details of provenances of manuscripts and, quite simply, for the sheer scale of its scope-about 15,000 manuscripts, described in 2,343 pages-it is an astonishing achievement.3 Sadly he fell ill and died when barely sixty, when he had really 1 See for example Helene Roberts, "Exhibition and
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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.008 |
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".