On the Liber de wazalkora, A 12th-Century Treatise on the Astrolabe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Liber de wazalkora” is the title of an unpublished Latin treatise on the construction and use of the planispheric astrolabe, which appears to have been compiled in southeast Germany (Bavaria) in the second half of the 12th century. It is to a large extent derived from other astrolabe sources available in the Latin West before 1100, but also contains material that has no precedent in any of the known literature. The analysis presented in this article concentrates on the Liber de wazalkora’s section on the use of the astrolabe, which is unusual for both its extraordinary length and frequently atypical astronomical content. A study of the Arabic loan vocabulary in this section leads to the conclusion that some parts of the text were derived from an unidentified Arabic source, presumably via a Latin intermediary. How to cite: Nothaft, C. P. E. “On the Liber de wazalkora, A 12th-Century Treatise on the Astrolabe”. Aestimatio: Sources and Studies in the History of Science (2023) 4: src02 1–58. https://doi.org/10.33137/aestimatio.v4.44061
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.005 |
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".