Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the assertion, ‘no one really wants to talk about COVID anymore’, has become a common refrain, cultural evidence suggests otherwise. Rather, cultural materials indicate not only a sustained interest in epidemic and pandemic experiences in the past but also continuing interest in our own pandemic era. However, this interest is often registered through gestures and brief mentions rather than explicit and sustained plague narratives. This paper considers these trends, especially in Gothic works, a literary tradition rooted in hyperbolic representations of threats that also represents disease on frank terms consistent with current medical knowledge. Pandemics appear in Gothic writing two centuries ago through brief references that suggest the daily experience of danger. Pandemic-era television is following the same strategies. Like ‘fevers’ and ‘plagues’ in the early 1800s, COVID-19 can be raised briefly and often indirectly. There is also attention to other aspects of the pandemic, including isolation and misinformation. In the popular Gothic series, Interview with the Vampire (2022–), ‘plague’ and misinformation are captured on terms drawn from earlier Gothic writing and intertwined to reflect on the misinformation of the COVID-19 era.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".