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Record W4406366799 · doi:10.1111/johs.12490

The Tyranny of the Abstract

2025· article· en· W4406366799 on OpenAlexaff
Derek Sayer

Bibliographic record

VenueSociology Lens · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAnthropology: Ethics, History, Culture
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

ABSTRACT Submitting an invited text for the Anthropology and Humanism festschrift “Hundreds for Katie,” I experienced cognitive dissonance between the objectives of ethnographic writing championed by Kathleen Stewart and the journal's submission requirements. The insistence that every submission must contain keywords and an abstract signifies deeper issues with academic writing. Specific forms of writing enforce the disciplinary norms of Thomas Kuhn's “normal science.” To “write difference”, we may need to write differently. The paper draws inter alia on works by Kathleen Stewart, Lauren Berlant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Peter Winch, Walter Benjamin, James Clifford, Georges Bataille, and members of the Mass–Observation group.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.024
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.176
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.028
Threshold uncertainty score0.128

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0240.176
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0050.005
Scholarly communication0.0150.006
Open science0.0020.006
Research integrity0.0050.011
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0280.020

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.

Opus teacher head0.039
GPT teacher head0.375
Teacher spread0.336 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreCommentary

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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