Bibliographic record
Abstract
Both historical and archival theorists use the concept of “context,” but with significantly different referents. Historical context generally refers to circumstances surrounding events or actors of interest, and can range from the local details of events to global trends. Archival context, in contrast, was rigorously defined during the emergence of canonical Western archival theory in the 19th century, and refers to assemblages of records created by an actor – individual or institutional – while conducting its business, which must be preserved according to the canons of provenance and respect des fonds. This paper argues that archival context itself has a history, however, and that the canonical version associated with modernity and a capitalist political economy was preceded in Europe by a particularist, pertinence-based understanding of archival context that emerged from the political economy of privilege in late medieval and early modern Europe. Moreover, a post-modern understanding of archival context embodied in the model of the records continuum is emerging today, in connection with a political economy of commodified information. The essay offers both historical cases and comparative considerations to illuminate this trajectory. Close attention to context in historical and archival theories, which look at how archival thinking and historical thinking were entwined over this entire trajectory, provides a fresh perspective for understanding both past deep structures and current tendencies. The goal of scholarship is both to make meaning out of the evidence around us in disciplinary ways, but also to reflect on the conditions of that meaning-making: the limitations, the questions unasked, the patterns not perceived. Looking at archival regimes as a historian – given that historians today are profoundly dependent on archives – can add a recursive and dynamic perspective on long-standing models of transformative change.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 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".