An Ephemeral Light: The Question of Death in the Artwork of Children who are Dying
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The question of death, and what happens after, is a query with no certain answer. Philosophers, scientists, artists, poets, and healthcare providers have grappled with the question of death and how best to answer it. Children with life-limiting illnesses (LLI) who face death in childhood are in a unique situation where their typical sources of information (i.e., the adults in their lives) may not be able to come up with a suitable answer when asked what happens when we die. As Plato stated, there is an inner child in all of us who is not totally convinced by assurances of an afterlife. What children with LLI understand of death and dying is not always easily conveyed in everyday language, but can be revealed in their artistic forms of expression. Artwork, poetry, and stories seem to carry the unintelligibility of death so that both children and adults may cope with it.
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 | 0.011 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.080 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".