COVID-19 in Perspective: A Witness Seminar
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In June 2023, we brought together leaders who responded to the emergency phase COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario as part of a "Witness Seminar." This approach to studying history was developed by the Institute of Contemporary British History. It has been extensively used in the history of science and medicine by the Wellcome Trust History of Twentieth Century Medicine. A witness seminar provides a collective oral history, in which participants can express diverse perspectives, build on each other's thoughts, and create a documentary record for policy makers and future historians. The published transcript provides an intimate look at how the pandemic played out in the eyes of some of key responders and raises many questions about the history of public health funding and administration in the province of Ontario, the failures in long-term care, and the need to improve pandemic communication. This article documents the success of the pandemic response.
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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.043 | 0.003 |
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".